Closets

      The most hated chore of all time is to clean the bedroom. When your mom or dad tells you to clean your room, you take one look at it and nearly pass out. You make every excuse for putting it off. Of course, we all know that waiting to clean it only makes the problem worse, but it is impossible to clean it the first time we are asked.
     The typical teenager's bedroom is a disaster zone: clothes strewn across the floor, crumpled papers that didn't make it into the waste basket, unfinished homework scattered on the desk, gum wrappers litter the ground, shoes and socks hastily thrown down, unmade bed... The floor is invisible under the layers of debris.
      When the time comes for the room to finally be purged of its filth, it looks as if the task will take years to complete, even if a team of professional cleaners was hired to help. But, seeing as you can not hire a team of professional cleaners, you must ask yourself How can I clean my room in as little time as possible? This is when the term "clean" is redefined. Your parents' definition of clean is that there is no trash in your room, all the clean clothes are put away, your bed is made, and the floor is absolutely spotless. Everything is organized and in the right place, and there is not one single thing out of place. However, upon examining the task at hand, you realize that this idea of cleanliness is impossible to achieve.
      At this point, you look at your room and sigh. How is it possible that your parents would expect this room to be spotless? After several minutes of scrounging through the mess, you find your bed and sit on its edge. You ponder your parents' command. Finally, you make a conclusion: As long as the room looks clean, it is clean. Thus begins your hour-long fight to make your room appear clean.
      But what is the easiest way to clean? It takes too long to go through and organize everything into boxes and drawers. It takes too much effort to decide what things to throw away, donate, or keep. So, you decide to shove everything into your closet.
      By the time you are done "cleaning," your closet doors are bulging and straining to stay closed. You are confident your parents will only see the tidy floor and be pleased with your work. You call your parents to your room, both of them in shock that you actually accomplished something. They smile as their eyes scan across the room, but their smiles fall slightly when their eyes reach the bulging closet doors. A pit is forming in your stomach because you can see where this is going. Your dad walks over to the closet door and you try to keep him from pulling it open. He doesn't need to pull hard on the door because the pressure of the junk on the inside shoves it open. Like a waterfall, the tower from inside the closet topples out and sprawls itself across your floor. You are back where you started.
      After a stern lecture about the accurate definition of what a clean room is, your parents leave you alone in your hazardously messy room to re-clean it. This time, you do the job right. It takes several consecutive days of gruelling, back-breaking work. In the end, though, you realize it was worth it. Your whole life feels less cluttered when your room is clean (that and you finally know what it's like to obey your parents).
      Closets are very multifaceted. They hold your clothes and hide your messes. In crime dramas or mystery movies, there is almost always a dead body in a closet. Closets are useful for the storage of things you don't need out at all times. For children, closets are the places where monsters dwell.
      Your heart is like a closet. It holds the good, the bad, and the ugly. It holds the key to who you are, who you want to be, and who you will be. It holds the secret of what you have done and will do.
       God is the parent who tells you to clean your room. He asks us to clean up our lives, but we redefine what we think He meant. A nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, once half-jokingly said "We pretend to be unable to understand [the Bible] because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly." When we decide to try to clean up our life according to our misinterpretation of God's instructions, we do it in a haphazard way. Instead of owning up to our errors, we shove them to the back of our hearts and hope to never see them again. By ignoring our sins, we are not taking care of the bigger problem-- we are only putting it off until it is re-discovered.
      Eventually, those sins we ignored, those skeletons in the closet, will reappear and make a bigger mess of things than before. Disappointment and shame overwhelm us when this happens, but these emotions are necessary to spark the appropriate reaction. This is when we realize that the sins we ignored need to be dealt with and thrown away. After giving up your sins, you will feel the satisfaction of being guilt-free and the warmth of a loving Father.