Friends
Peace be with you.
Have you ever wanted to leave a note on a coworker’s desk but worried that, if you did, it would just blend in with all the other pieces of paper and they’d never know they needed to call Jason back about the extended warranty of their car? Historically, that’s the way my desk looked but, as I’ve shared before, I’m making an effort to have a clean desk at the end of each day. In fact, last week, I even took it a step further by removing everything from my desk drawers so I could vacuum the corners and only put back what was absolutely necessary. For instance, did I need three staplers or could Denise maybe use one of them? Or how about that receipt for a pizza I ordered from Second Street six months ago? I figured it’s pretty safe to say I wasn’t going to return it so I threw it away. And those stacks of paper telling me to call Jason about my extended warranty even got recycled. He gets tired of me calling and asking if his refrigerator is running anyway.
In my last year of college, I was a Resident Assistant, or RA, which meant it was my job basically to be the Barney Fife of Loras College. My Hall Director boss, whose name was Terri, was a petit but forceful woman determined to run a residence hall where people could feel safe and have fun. In the evenings, it was our responsibility to sit at her desk and respond to any problems in the hall and make sure everything was as it should be. After the first night I did this, I left her desk as I was accustomed to a desk looking: with notes and papers and a couple of Mountain Dew cans sitting on it. The next morning, there was a sharp knock on my door and Terri was standing on the other side looking kind of...frazzled. She simply said, “Come with me” and walked me to her office. She opened the door, pointed to her desk and said, “This will NEVER happen again.” I smiled and said, “Okay, what do you mean by this?” She walked to her desk and started violently moving the papers all around and knocking the pop cans on the floor while saying, “This clutter on my desk. This will never happen again. If you need to leave me or anyone else on staff a note, put it in our mailboxes. If you have garbage, throw it away or recycle it. Put pens and paper and the stapler and other office supplies back in the drawers you got them from. Do whatever you need to do but I will not walk into a dirty desk ever again.” Now, I said Terri was petit but forceful before. She was probably a foot shorter than me and 125 pounds soaking wet but at this point, she may as well have been the size of Hulk Hogan. I was intimidated. So, when she asked, “Do you understand?” I nodded and said yes and just kind of froze in place not knowing what to do. She smiled and said in an entirely different tone, “Good. Then we’re good. Get to class so I can get some work done.”
In the first reading for Mass tonight, God says he will write his law on our hearts. It won’t be something foreign or external to ourselves, it will be something personal and internal. But God’s not saying that morality is completely personal, as though I could have my moral truths and you can have your completely contradictory ones. God is still the author of the truths, they’re just written on our hearts. But, it does mean we need to pay attention to what is happening internally, what God is writing on our hearts. I wonder how many of us have a pretty cluttered workspace when we try to read God’s writing. Personally, my heart can be filled with things happening at work, the tasks that need to be completed, the discourteous or angry email I received from someone, or a job that I wish I would have done better. There are concerns I have about family members and friends who are sick or struggling with their jobs or families. I have some personal concerns like taxes, or my shower that is leaking or the constant need to wash my masks. And things like television shows, podcasts, and internet videos that are cluttering up my heart as well. If God wants to warn me that the warranty to my life is almost up, he may have to make his writing like the thunderclap in the gospel for me to see it.
What should we do to declutter our hearts? I think you may be expecting me to say that we need to give up our devices and TVs and simplify, simplify, simplify. But, in prayer, I decided to go a slightly different way: we should bring all this clutter to Jesus and ask him to help us sort it out.
Those concerns about incomplete tasks or frustrations with coworkers and clients or jobs we wish we’d done better: bring those to Jesus and ask for his direction on how to do them better or fix those broken relationships.
Speaking of relationships, those concerns about friends and family, we can bring to Jesus and ask for healing and help. We could even ask our family or our friends to pray with us, to bring them to Jesus together. Imagine saying to your wife or your husband that you’re worried about his or her health and asking her to join you in bringing that concern to Jesus. How powerful would that be?
And all those shows and videos that clutter our hearts, bring those to Jesus and bask with him in the beauty or humor of them with him. Or, if you don’t think he’d find them particularly beautiful or humorous, ask yourself if you should be watching them in the first place and ask Jesus to help declutter them from your heart if you shouldn’t.
God wants to write his law of love on our hearts. Are we willing to watch him mess up the papers on the desks of our hearts and take him seriously when he challenges us that, “This will never happen again!” or are we too comfortable in our own clutter to let it go?
