I have an office at home that Sarah built into a closet. It’s my “cloffice”. It’s a thing on Pinterest. Google it. Now the nice thing about having a “cloffice” is that it doesn’t take up a ton of space, it isn’t an eye sore, and I can close the closet doors and it disappears. The bad thing is, I can close the closet doors and it will disappear. There are a lot of things that end up on my desk in my “cloffice” that I don’t really want to deal with. Letters, bills, invitations, statements, invoices, old bulletins, programs from funerals and weddings, notes I took convinced I would look at again and more. Most of these things can be dealt with. Most of them can be addressed, solved, and/or archived and I can move on. But instead, I keep them on my desk, in my office, in my closet.
Now you likely don’t have a cloffice, but you have either a place or area of life where you think, “I can just put that there and deal with it later.” The inbox of your email or your soul. The to do list that weighs on your heart and mind. Things start to pile up and after awhile it gets to be overwhelming that you may not even know where to start. Many of us want to literally close our cloffice doors or metaphorically look the other direction while the pile gets larger and larger.
Our life doesn’t get better when we pretend to ignore what needs to be addressed. Avoiding things that need to be taken care of sometimes works, but more often than not you end up creating more problems that could have been addressed simply early on. No dentist says, “I know you had that pain in your tooth last year, but I can see you really ignored the problem, didn’t brush, and it took care of itself. You did exactly what you should have done!” We would never go to a dentist that treats us that way…so why do we treat ourselves that way? Why do we let our problems mount up? Why do we ignore the problem and kick it down the road? Why do we let a pile stack up in the cloffice of our heart and soul assuming that we can just close the door and make it disappear?
Jesus wants to meet you…and your problems. He isn’t just interested in you when everything is taken care of. He isn’t interested in a perfected version of you. He isn’t interested in a you that seems to have it all together. He is interested in you, with all your faults and failures. You with all your late bills, unanswered invites, and unpaid invoices. He’s interested in you even though you’ve fallen short, stumbled, sinned, and failed. Because He is making all things new. He wants to make you new.
In the book of Isaiah, God speaks to Israel and tells them that He is their savior. He is the one who created you, He is the one who formed you, He is the one who has redeemed you, He is the one who called you by name, He is the one who will be with you. He then says, I am doing new things, making a way in the wilderness and a river in the desert. A place that seems impossible to cross, he will make a path. A place that seems dry and barren, he will bring water and life. Where things seems impossible, insurmountable, irredeemable, or unforgivable and we just want to close the cloffice doors…God says, I am doing something new here.
Your struggles, your problems or issues may feel like they destroyed you, like they damaged you, but they will not define you. Those debts and regrets may be piling up, but they will not have the last word. Swing those cloffice doors wide and don’t hide what’s piled up. Bring it all to God and see what He can do with it. He is your savior. He is the one who created you. He is the one who formed you. He is the one who redeems you. He is the one who calls you by name. He is with you. He is making a way.