A DESK DISASTER!

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a desk disaster

MY PERSONAL DESK DISASTER

I read a very thought provoking post last week by Jake over at verymuchlater.com about his messy desk. He went on to use the clutter on his desk and specifically his dead camera that he hadn’t tossed out as an analogy of our lives.

I considered my desk that looks like someone tossed a grenade on and decided I’d like to write about the same subject. Jake gave me the thumbs up to use his post as my inspiration. By the way, I’d highly recommend a visit to Jake’s site, first a heads up. It’s great reading, but there is no candy coating over at verymuchlater.com, Jake calls it like it is.

I had to take a few moments to figure out how my desk got to be such a disaster. The rest of my home office looks fine, my wife even dusted it for me last week, but the desk? No one would know where to start, including me.

I realize my desk is like many things in life that become a little messy and out of sorts. It starts with being a little lax or maybe just plain lazy and so begins the pattern. The same pattern my youngest falls into with her room, the difference is we punish her for the example we’ve set in some cases.

It’s a good thing my office isn’t part of a glass house the way I’ve been tossing stones around lately.

The desk disaster started with some research papers I had compiled for a manuscript I was working on but have now scrapped. I didn’t want to throw them away, I might pick the writing back up, then I’ll need that information for sure. I don’t really have a perfect place to store something like an unfinished manuscript and the piles of research papers to go with it, but I do have a place…

The rejection letters I’ve received from literary agents I kept where they could be seen in a neat stack that somehow seemed to grow with all kinds of papers. Now I have to assume those rejection notices that I use for inspiration are still under there somewhere.

My Bible study materials I sort of figured was like making a bed, I’m gonna be using them soon so why go to the bother of putting them back on the shelf when I’m gonna be taking them back down?

That’s how the snowball started, it picked up momentum along the way and now seems like an unstoppable monster. I can’t clean it up, I don’t have the time or know where to start!

Maybe some of you reading have an area of your life like that as well? My office represents the lives of many people I think. We’re pretty disciplined and have almost everything in our lives together, except for that one thing. The whole life or office looks perfect, but somewhere in that life or office we find that weakness, a desk disaster.

Most times the weakness is spawned in our flesh and the lack of discipline or human laziness keeps us from doing the right thing; Reaching toward God for His strength for discipline in our lives.

It’s easy to spot other people’s desk disasters in our lives, they aren’t the same ones we have so we can’t relate to them in some cases. Sometimes you can hear people talk about others perceived weaknesses, other times the voices doing a fair amount of the judging comes from inside us.

“Look at Sam Wafar, he’s everywhere, and sooooo greedy”!  “Did you see what Susie Que was wearing –she’s got some issues to be dressing like that”!  “How about Floyd’s desk, it looks like his clothes”! Then there are the other messes or sometimes disasters that are unseen.

Like most weaknesses, the pattern starts with one action, one act lacking self-discipline. It’s human nature. One person can drop a piece of trash in a field and before long it looks like a dump.

The solution to the problem will take an enormous amount more discipline to clean up than it would have taken to do the right thing the first time. God gives us the opportunity to clean up our lives and especially the extra messy parts no one else can see.

The clean up process starts just in reverse of how the mess got there in the first place, one piece at a time…

My guess is that we all have something that needs a good spring cleaning, even if it is Winter…