Cleanse My Heart, Turn My Eyes.

I remember one breezy, cold day at school when my class was encouraged to go out and serve the community by picking up trash. Everybody who volunteered was assigned a small part of town, I was assigned to this one intersection with an empty plot of land. I had actually walked past that plot every day the past few months and didn’t really remember seeing any trash lying on the ground, so I figured it would be a relatively quick task. Excited to get this over with, especially given the temperature, I went to my zone and began to look. At first it was difficult, the dying grass was fairly high and my small  hands were very cold. As I looked closer, I found more and more garbage all over this empty, dying plot of land. It became overwhelming. It seemed like I would spend five minutes in a certain section, move on to another one, then glance back and see more garbage I had somehow missed in my first pass by. I felt overwhelmed at how big this task was, this task of cleaning up the land. I couldn’t do it, I would need another two hours to finish my assigned chunk, let alone the rest of the town! How were we, a team of four, supposed to begin to make a dent in all the trash lying around the city? What about other cities? The world? Before I knew it, two hours had passed and I still was finding garbage in the plot and was crying in the rain.A bit over dramatic, I know. Welcome to my life.Let me give you a little more context of what had been going on in my heart the week leading up to that frigid day; I had been feeling stagnant. I wasn't seeing any growth in my spiritual life. Worship was becoming bland and prayer felt more like a routine than a relationship. I was stuck, and I wanted to get out. I wanted to learn and be challenged. The slight problem was I had no idea what was wrong. I was doing all the right things, but my heart was just numb to it all. That week before the garbage day, I remember praying on my knees, desperately asking God what was wrong? Why wasn't I learning or growing or feeling anything anymore?It's funny how when we ask very honest questions, we can get painfully honest answers.The answer I got that day was simply sin. There was just a lot of sinful patterns that needed to change. There wasn't any condemnation or disappointment in the tone that I felt God speaking over me, just an honest answer to a hard question. So my week leading up to this day was filled with repentance. I was allowing my eyes to be opened to the sin in my heart and began to see how that was affecting my spiritual life. He chipped away at my pride, and the ways I had overlooked the needs of others. He showed me how I needed to be more vulnerable with Him, my loving Father, and to trust that He would care for my delicate heart. There wasn't anything that would scare him away from loving me. There was layer upon layer of things that I began to realize were blocking me from the intimate relationship with God that I craved. Once I stopped ignoring and began seeking out the trash in my life, I saw the enormity of the task before me. And it was overwhelming, much like the trash in that lot. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the time. I didn’t even know how to begin cleaning up my mess of a heart. That brings us back to the empty lot, where a cold, crying Breanna was beginning to understand a beautiful truth through tear-stained eyes and a runny nose. My frustration with myself came to the surface through my afternoon picking up trash from what began to look more and more like a landfill. My tears were not from my care for the environment (sorry if you think they should have been); they were from the exhaustion of trying to rid myself of my sin. After the gravity of that struggle had hit me over and over again with every piece of garbage I put in the bag, I felt God say to me “the sin in your heart isn’t your mess to clean up. Give it to me, I’ve already done the heavy lifting.” That’s the beauty of grace, we aren’t the ones who have to pick up all the sin. We can’t. We aren’t Jesus. Yet so often I want to fix myself, I want to help, I need to, because it’s my fault. Jesus is already done. By dying on the cross, he picked up every piece of garbage that was cluttering up my heart. Every empty wrapper that was trying to cover up the freedom and redemption in Christ’s sacrifice. Thankfully, it’s not my job to clean up my act in order to earn my way to Kingdom living; it’s because He already did that I get to live it to its fullest right now. words by Breanna Maier and photo by Shelby Bauer