Cleaning Out

Somewhere in my personality lives a powerful procrastinator. She doesn't rule the roost all the time; mostly I keep her under control. But she shows up at certain times. Most especially when I have to move.

It's been over a month since I announced my leaving, and I have just over two weeks to go. I put off packing up my office before Christmas, because there's more than enough going on at that time, and the last thing I wanted to do was make an intentional mess in my office (thereby compounding the unintentional one that always shows up during high holy seasons). But with just two weeks to go - and very busy ones at that - it's past time to start cleaning out and packing up. I've made a few half-hearted efforts, doing things that aren't immediately visible like clearing out old files. But yesterday, I started in earnest. My office is now a mess, and it's not going to get any better until it's altogether empty.

This clean up, certainly not coincidentally, began as I started to feel really, really ready to leave my congregation. I remember the summer after I graduated from high school, I worried for nearly the whole summer break that I was not really ready to go to college; that I would be homesick, that I wouldn't like it, that I'd be miserable, etc. And then one day I was at the grocery store with my mom and my then-twelve-year-old brother, and I sort of snapped: something about them was so irritating to me that I thought, in the middle of the cereal aisle, "I have to go to college. RIGHT NOW." Naturally, that moment said everything about me and almost nothing about them.

I've hit the same moment here. I love this place, and I love these people, but I have to go. RIGHT NOW. And one way I can both remind myself that I need to be attentive about my leaving in every way is to incarnate it physically by making a big ol' mess in my office and stacking up boxes and giving myself no more excuses to put it off. I hate a mess in my office, though its usual state would appear messy to most people. (This is only because they are unaware of my personal organization system within the piles of paper.) Certainly one thing I hate about a mess is how out of control it makes me feel. For that reason alone, it's completely appropriate to make a mess now: to remind myself that I am not in control, and that that alone may well be my salvation.

So, here we go. Time to make a mess. Time to trust what I said in my own sermon last week: that Jesus doesn't always clean up our messes, or at least not immediately, but that he also never leaves us alone in them.

I did discover yesterday that there is a certain joy and freedom in tossing things out. I threw a few piles of things into the trash bin with almost too much glee: I thought of them as burdens I've carried while I've been here, and I imagined throwing out the burdens along with the stuff. That part I enjoyed, and I'll try to keep at it today. There are also moments in the cleaning to treasure memories, and that's good work too.

Big mess, here I come.