My Junk Drawer Interprets Nehemiah

We have one...and you do too!

That stupid drawer that haunts you at night when you're trying to sleep. Stuffed to every square inch with receipts, expired coupons, phone books from the past 2 years, pens, rulers, a cloth measuring tape, ripped envelopes with doodles on it from a phone conversation last June...It's a junk drawer!

Here's the beauty of the junk drawer, when you need to clean up quickly, you can pull it open shove your junk in it and slam it shut. Your guest gets to sit just 3 feet away enjoying how clean your house is. You, on the other hand, are sweating to the thump of that tell tale heart beating away from within the junk drawer.

I was reading in Nehemiah this morning and something struck me. Even though the most memorable part of the story told by Nehemiah is how they rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem, after you get through the first 6 chapters you don't hear much else about it.

With the wall fixed after 52 days the Israelites had nothing but their internal matters to turn to. And as they read the law of God and remembered their history they came to the chilling realization that they may have fortified themselves against outside attacks by fixing the wall, but it was their internal struggles that took down the wall to begin with. If they didn't figure out how to obey God's commands and live according to his principles they would eventually be right back where they started.

I guess you see where I'm going with this...we stuff our junk in the junk drawer and celebrate the fact that things look clean. The problem, however, is not the junk, but the fact that the junk was strewn around to begin with. At some point the junk drawer is going to get full so unless you begin to fix the behavior that's making the place a mess you'll eventually run out of hiding places and sooner or later you'll have to fix the real problems...