Twenty six years of kids will leave you with a lot of accumulated junk. Lost and forgotten treasures lurk within every box, stuffed in long forgotten tubs and drawers, all for the unsuspecting mommy to go through when the brood flies the coop. They seem to only take the necessities when they move out and leave the rest for mom and dad to sort…well just mom really. Little do they know that their prized trophy from the fifth grade floor hockey tournament hit the trash can years ago. So sad, so long.

My dear husband the coupon king cannot pass up a bargain and when school supplies hit the stores he was there to get paper, pencils, markers and spiral notebooks for five kids. As I forage through their past, I have come to discover a treasure trove of minimally used, half used, and NOT used school supplies.We have a quantity of spiral notebooks just barely written in, or doodled upon that will keep us in paper until we turn to dust. I don’t even want to talk about the notebook paper supply that when you actually try to handle the paper, it crumbles. Colored pencils…now there is a story. Teachers want students to have them for the solitary project they have assigned in the school year. My darling would purchase new sets each year because the little pumpkins couldn’t imagine using the same ones the following year. Clearly mommy wasn’t along on these shopping forays. Let’s do the math, shall we? Five kids times twelve colored pencils times twelve years of school. Let’s just say I plan on building our retirement home purely out of markers and pencils.

All the accumulated clutter we gather over the years that we often think we must have really comes into perspective as we look at it through the lens of years later. We have boxes, closets, attics, garages, and storage units to house all the junk we can’t seem to part with. Yet, when we pass to the next life there will be those who must sift through what is left and much of it will go where it belongs…the dumpster. We come into this world with nothing and will go out of it in the same way.

Lent is this awesome time each year to really reflect on our lives and what we have that either leads us to or away from God. It is a time of detachment. We need to take a really good look at “what, who and how” we fill our days and nights. We have but limited time on this planet, we are dust and to dust we shall return.

This past couple of weeks for me has been pretty crazy and filled with pain and sadness. It has brought the sudden death of a spouse for two people I know, divorce papers being served to two beautiful women I am close to, the demise of a marriage, a friend whose husband has cancerous tumors all over his body, and news of some personal health challenges.

Life is full of suffering and can be a cause for doubt, lost faith, despair, found faith and newfound hope as well. Lent for me, is a time to embrace all that and see its greater purpose in light of the cross. God “chastises” those He loves. When we accept all that pain and bring it to the cross it can be a way to suffer along with Christ and bring about so much good. The old adage to “offer it up,” is really very good advice. We will spend eternity I hope, in conversation about the many ways our little sacrifices and offerings made all the difference for someone else.

Really use this time of Lent to search your life, and toss out the clutter now. Anything or anyone that does not lead you to being the YOU God created you to be needs to go. Pray deeper for discernment, detach from harmful behaviors, confess and clean out the hidden closet of your soul now. We are not promised a long and pain-free life, but we are told that Christ will never leave us and that is great news.

Come Easter morning we can really celebrate because we will have walked that road to Calvary these forty days and will know the true joy of new life. My Easter basket will be filled with shredded notebook paper and brimming with chocolate and that morning I hope to walk into the light of a new life, one step closer to heaven than I was forty days earlier.