Before I started staying at a dorm near school back in third year college, I used to clean my room three times a year: one every after term. I know most people hate cleaning their rooms, and while I don’t particularly love it, I do it because it’s either I do it or my mom does it. I don’t like that because when that happens I can’t find anything in my room, plus there are a lot of things inside my room (i.e. my journal, among other things) that are a bit too personal for other people’s consumption. So I take the time every term to clean my room — who wants to sleep in a mess anyway?

And as with every cleaning binge, I find myself faced with so many things after cleaning: junk. All kinds of junk — from old test papers to notes to empty bottles of perfume to old worn out scrunchies to old and empty pens to almost anything that can accumulate in a span of three to four months. Some of them end up under my bed, behind my desk, inside my drawers and sometimes even behind my shoes. It’s funny and frustrating how so much junk could get stored up in such a short amount of time; to think I’m almost always out in school most of the time and the most time I spend in my room is when I sleep.

If that much junk could get inside a room for a span of three months, think of how many junk we get to accumulate in our lives in a span of…say, one day? I know that’s not long — in fact, comparing that to eternity, a day is probably just a grain of sand. But do you know how much junk we can store in our souls in a day? Do you have any idea?

I’d like to think of every day as a blank slate; a day where I can start over again and sort of forget my mistakes the day before. But sometimes, halfway during the day, I feel tired and frustrated about all the wrong things I have been doing or have been happening. Like, say, today, I didn’t get to go to school again because of the rain — that’s frustrating. Or say your sibling said something that annoyed you all of a sudden and you ended up fighting with him/her. A shouting match — and it’s only 10:00 am. What a day it must be huh? Or what about going through a day where you think you were actually good — and then falling into sin at night because your eyes landed on some magazine or you happen to chance upon a TV channel that is showing some “steamy” scenes?

Junk. Our lives are full of junk. Some big, some small, but junk nonetheless. You might say that you have a cleaner life than I do and I might insist that I am far more junk-free than that guy over there, but in the end, it’s still what it is: junk. If cleaning my room from junk every four months is frustrating, try cleaning out your life every day from junk. That would be even more frustrating. It’s hard enough deciding if a thing should be thrown away or not, why do I have to go through it every day?

Let me end this post with two quotes to think about.

“And remember this…the junk in your life and the junk in [his] life aren’t really all that different when you compare them to the holiness of the One who forgives them both. They’re both just pretty much junk.”
– Jake Phillips to his daughter Savannah, Savannah by the Sea, p. 256

“I love you the way you are, but I refuse to leave you that way.” (God)
– Kuya Philip, Talk 4, SFC CLP, May 20, 2006

Have a blessed rainy day everyone. :) Keep safe. :)