As I was cleaning the other day, I realized how different our house looks now as compared to a
year ago. You know, before Covid, back when our house was simply our home and we actually
left the house for things like school and work. Now we’re going on a year of our house serving
multiple purposes. It’s still a place of refuge and relaxation, a couch to sit down on and cozy up
with a good book or binge Netflix. But my husband who traveled full-time for twenty years is
now working from our home office full-time, and so while our office has two desks, I haven’t sat
at mine since March. I do most of my work from the dining room table. My desk in the office is
now a staging area, the place you find packing tape, rulers, and the stapler. My son’s high
school rotates between in-person and at-home classes; he works partly upstairs in his bedroom
and partly on the opposite side of our dining table. The middle of the table is currently a
no-man’s-land of various papers, a stack of cloth napkins, a bowl of clementines, and leftover
Christmas candy. Actually eating at the dining table presents a challenge.

Despite my eyes seeing chaos and clutter, what surprised me is that I’m actually OK with the
current state of our house. My typical standards of feeling that everything must have a place
and essentially maintaining our home ever-ready for an open house are entirely out the
window. It felt good to not react, to feel like I’ve experienced some growth in simply accepting
things as they are. My mind went to the Exodus 3:5 verse: “the place on which you are
standing is holy ground.” Yes, I thought, it’s holy chaos! Holy clutter! And rightfully so, after
all, our homes these days are holy; we’re staying home to protect ourselves and protect others,
to do our part as members of the one human family.

Feeling inspired, I decided to Google “prayer for clutter,” assuming I’d be validated in thinking
that I’ve achieved some level of spiritual growth for accepting the condition of our home.
Instead, I found various faith-based blogs on homekeeping. Sure, some of them offered
practical advice for dealing with clutter, but they were largely from the perspective that clutter
was something to be confessed and removed from your life in order to experience clarity of
heart and mind. I can respect that thinking; it’s understandable that clutter can be an obstacle
at times. But right now, I choose to welcome it into my life as holy.

So I invite you, the next time you look around your house and perhaps see the effects of Covid
all around, to consider your clutter as holy. And since apparently a prayer for holy clutter
doesn’t exist, I decided to write my own. I welcome you to pray with me:

Gracious and loving God,
Who intimately knows our hearts in this difficult time we’re living through,
Help us to accept things as they are, to let go of anxiousness and worry, to release expectations
and welcome even the clutter that fills our homes as holy.
Through Your Light that dwells within each of us and shines bright in the exact place where we
are standing,
We pray, Amen.

Blessings & peace to you,
Jennifer, CPE Intern