31 Days: Clear.

This is Day 13 of the 31 Days of Small series.

One of the unlovely jobs after a prolonged power outage is cleaning out your freezer and fridge.  If you are lucky, you are able to get in there before the food begins to spoil and rot with black mold.  If you are not lucky, then you will open the doors and you feel like you will never unsmell that scent again.  

Cue the dry heave. 

On the second day of our power outage, I woke up and was instantly mad all over.  I had gotten a faint whiff of the second day post-hurricane smell.  On the first day following a major storm, the air smells delicious.  The storm has snapped trees in half and shaken pine needles and cones all over the place, and the smell of freshly cut wood is overwhelming.  But on the days following, the world begins to stink a little.  It's a mixture of flood waters and generator fumes and non-circulating air in your homes.  People haven't bathed properly in a few days and laundry begins to sour.  Trash services haven't run and things start to get backed up, and you pray that your toilets are still flushing as well.

I remember the entire city of Greenville smelling awful for several days after Floyd.  Scrub all you want, but all the bleach in the world can't kill that smell.  It's on you, it's in you, and you don't forget.  

Sometimes our relationships are like our freezers we need to clean out.  If we neglect them, they start to deteriorate and get lost in back of our busy schedules.  Sometimes we remember to pull them out, and sometimes we forget until something catastrophic happens.  Restocking the fridge is not a good feeling--it's expensive, it's time consuming, and there are things that cannot always be immediately replaced (like all those pecans and TWO unopened bottles of your favorite seasonal creamer that you have been waiting 10 months for them to return to the stores and you finally found them like a unicorn the day the storm hits your area, and then you have to throw them away because they didn't make it.)

Shame on you, Matthew.

Rebuilding relationships can sometimes be hard and expensive on your heart as well.  There can be hurt feelings and situations that can't always be dealt with immediately.  Sometimes you can fix them, and sometimes you can't.  And sometimes you just need an act of God to get things moving in the right direction.  

Stripping away all of the junk and getting to the bare bones of your heart and relationships can make you feel small.  It tends to make you uncover a lot of junk along the way, and there can be some bridges that need to be rebuilt.  

But a clean slate is always a good start.