I met Jesus as a child, but I got to know Him on a personal level as an adult. The beauty of knowing Jesus personally, which happened when I started reading the Bible for myself, was finally learning that this childhood impression of Him was wrong.
- Thinking I should hide my mess from Jesus was the opposite of what I needed to do.
Thinking about Jesus in this way was, honestly, dangerous. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that I need to get my life together before coming to Jesus. It just says come to Jesus. Open the door if He knocks. He won’t be surprised or shocked or horrified by your mess. He wants to come inside and spend time with you. He wants to shine His light over it all. Not to shame you, but because His light is the only thing that can make it better.
And to be clear, I’m not just talking about dirty dishes, piles of laundry, and a garage full of clutter. We’ve already established that Jesus doesn’t care about your messy house. I’m talking about all of it. All of you. Your non-sin struggles and the sins you fear could never be forgiven.
Open the door if Jesus is knocking.
There’s literally nothing you need to do first before you open up your heart and let Him inside. He wants you to let Him love you exactly as you are today. At this very moment. Nothing you do can scare Jesus away from you.
If you think you have to fix your life before you come to Jesus, then you don’t fully understand what He’s asking of you. He’s asking for all of you, whatever that includes. He’s asking you to let Him handle it all. In Matthew 11:28–30, Jesus said,
Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.
Once you open the door to Jesus, everything will change. You’ll start down the path of understanding His heart, and your heart will change as you go. But first go ahead and open that door. Welcome Jesus in.
Finding Your Why
In decluttering circles, there’s a lot of talk about “finding your why.” The idea is that knowing why you hang on to things so tightly will help you let go of them. Or that understanding why you want to change will help you change. That’s fine, but I generally don’t teach about finding your why. I just teach decluttering.
What I have found is that most of us have plenty of clutter to purge before we even get to the stuff that might benefit from knowing our why. I could get rid of a lot of my stuff faster by not taking the time to stare off into space asking myself why it was there. I can wonder why I put the empty fettucine box back on the shelf, but I can throw it in the garbage much faster than I can answer that (unanswerable) question.
I learned my why as I decluttered. I learned it as I threw away trash. I learned my why while I did the easy stuff and answered my fact-based, nonemotional decluttering questions. I figured out what was important to me as I blamed containers for not being big enough to keep things that weren’t as important.
I had lived with my house being (mostly) decluttered and functional for almost an entire decade when it hit me that my why wasn’t what I would have assumed it was in the beginning. For the first few years of my deslobification journey, I kept hoping to get to the point where I was a different me. A new version of me who didn’t struggle anymore and whose house looked like the pictures I saw in magazines or on Pinterest.
I’m so thankful I wasn’t focusing on that why, because I understood my real why only after a lot of the clutter was gone. Having my house under control lets me be me. And I am someone who enjoys things that have nothing to do with my house. I like writing. I like making videos and podcasts. I like being able to volunteer my house for a bunch of girls to get ready for prom when the original prep house loses power during a thunderstorm. I like being able to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invite my college friends (after many years of missed May Trips) to my house when I realize it’s in the path of totality for a solar eclipse. I like being able to do that without panicking or needing to rent a storage unit to make space for them to sleep. I like being able to hire a house sitter to care for my naughty dog who got banned from boarding at the local kennel. If you truly relate to where I was before I got my house under control, you know that the idea of someone staying in your home while you’re not there is the promised land of many a hopeful declutterer. I wanted to get my house under control so I could do the things that make me... me. I didn’t want my house to hold me back from living the life I wanted to live.
Ultimately, my why is eternal.
- I always say that the things I teach about housekeeping and decluttering boil down to reality acceptance. Accepting that my relationship with Jesus is the only thing that will last for eternity is the ultimate reality acceptance.
And knowing I’ll spend eternity with Jesus is the ultimate freedom to be who God created me to be.
Whatever your why, whether it’s trauma or a chemical imbalance or your love of history or possibilities or anything else, Jesus won’t glance askew at your stuff or the reason for it when you bring Him into your life.
This book is coming out in 2025. That means (almost) every single person capable of reading it has been through a traumatic event. One definition of trauma on Google is “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.” I once heard trauma described as any situation where life was one way before the event and then completely different after. We all lived through a pandemic, so we’ve all experienced trauma. Whatever your views or feelings or experiences of the pandemic, it was life-altering in a way that I never would have considered possible. One of my kids ended high school and started college in 2020. His life path was literally altered by something completely outside anyone’s control. My father’s life path was literally altered by the Vietnam War draft. It happens. Life happens. The path is altered more dramatically for some of us than for others.
I finished writing the original draft of this book in the first week of March 2020. I thought I’d finish it up when my kids went back to school after spring break. Har-dee-har-har-har. They never went back to school that year, and the following school year was a roller coaster. It took me two years to come back to this manuscript, and more years to finally finish it.
Coming back to this manuscript was a little scary. What if everything I’d written about washing hands didn’t hold up after going through a global pandemic? But it did. The book was never about washing hands or washing dishes or throwing out trash or decluttering closets. It was about Jesus. Jesus and His passionate desire for our hearts to be turned passionately to Him. And that holds up just fine.
Excerpted with permission from Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Messy House by Dana K. White, copyright Dana K. White.
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Your Turn
Getting your home in order might be something that harangues you and brings guilt and shame. But, that’s not how Jesus looks at your home… or your life and heart. He just wants in because He just wants you! ~ Devotionals Daily