Keith Battle - Spring Cleaning Pt 4. Calendar Scrubbing

This series, I pray, has been not so much informative as transformative. I’m hoping that there are things you’ve heard. If this is your first part, then I understand if you haven’t made any applications, but hopefully, there’s something you’re gaining from this that you can apply to your life. In part one, we talked about how guilt and grief can paralyze you if you don’t get past them. If you don’t move on with your life, you can be stuck in a place that’s over. You know, have you ever seen one of those TV shows where they reenact scenes or try to give you a reenactment of what happened? You can never go back. I don’t care how much you try; you can’t go back. You did your best; you move on. And in part two, we talked about things in spring cleaning that we need to replace and repair. Last week, we discussed things that need to be removed from our spiritual homes and our physical homes. We talked about removing anger, and today I want to wrap this series up by discussing something else. This stuff really went on in my house: my youngest son cleaned out our freezer and our pantry in our kitchen. The pantry is where we keep things like spaghetti noodles and canned goods. We had items in there from 2009, past their expiration dates—you know, things that you just leave there, almost like furniture. You wonder if you’re ever going to eat them, but they just become a part of the decor. The freezer was so cluttered that if you opened it wrong, things would fall out. Have you ever had a freezer so full of stuff that you had to shove things in and stack them awkwardly? And then there were potatoes and chicken that were so old they seemed to look at you as if to say, «I know you’re not going to eat me. I expired in 2014!» So, he cleaned all that out, and I’m telling you, the freezer is organized now; there’s no chaos. I can see racks that I didn’t even know were there. I can see the structure of the freezer, and in the pantry, I see actual shelf space. By the way, if you’re waiting on God to send you something new, you need to get rid of things you no longer use to make room. Make room for what’s coming—be willing to clear things out for a moment because it’s coming! Yeah, what we got out of his work was the removal of items we can no longer utilize, which brought order, and we got rid of chaos. I asked myself: how does that work in our lives? The best analogy I could find is in our schedules. Our schedules are so cluttered with things that prevent us from taking care of what matters most. Some of us are so busy and preoccupied that the things and people who matter most get put on the back burner. Things that matter don’t scream for our attention; they whisper for our attention, while things that don’t matter impose themselves into our schedule. A lot of us have these schedules that need a «calendar scrub,» as my brother calls it. So, my subtitle today is «A Calendar Scrub.» It’s a military concept where military staff get together and go over a leader’s schedule. They say, «All right, what do we need to erase? What do we need to clean up? And what do we need to add?» Because every addition requires a removal. Whenever you add something to your schedule without taking something off, and you’re already busy, you end up in overload. You can’t just add to your schedule; you have to make decisions about it. I believe our schedules and our lives come down to these two main categories: responsibilities and resources. We all have responsibilities, depending on where we are in life. Some of us have responsibility for one or two children and jobs, and even within our jobs, we have certain projects we are responsible for and perhaps people we supervise. We have responsibilities as siblings, for car notes, rental payments, or mortgage payments, and then we are responsible for utilities. Some of us are involved in service and have volunteer responsibilities, small group commitments, and side jobs or businesses, or we might coach sports. All of us have a list of responsibilities. This responsibility list is supported by our resources, which are the things we bring to bear on our responsibilities. One of our resources is time; I use my time for my job, for my siblings, and for my children. Another resource is money—many of these responsibilities require it. Sometimes we need our talents or skills, and occasionally wisdom and knowledge come into play. And how about patience?..