As so often happens the spiritual and the practical overlap in our lives, applying layers of meaning to both. This lent coincides with some tremendous home improvement and spring cleaning. 

Tremendous. 

Cleaning and sorting our physical space provides a visual for the sort of work lent invites us to do. Likewise, spiritual discipline encourages me to look around my space and see where it could benefit from similar purging and reworking.  Short answer: lots of places.

Our tired little kitchen pantry has gotten some attention.  It had not been painted with the kitchen years ago and the shelving was peeling. The baseboards were still dark wood and didn’t match the rest of the kitchen.  and This was a low budget effort to be sure. Leftover paint and contact shelf paper brightened things up.  

For the record this is not the sum total of all the dry goods I keep on hand. We also have bulk bins of brown rice and oats nearby and a ridiculous number of spices and cake making items sorted in dish tubs in a cabinet. I’m finding less is more by way of storing food however.  We hit a critical mass point when we can’t easily see what we have.  That leads to wasted food and purchasing doubles.  For this reason I don’t plan to fill this space up too much more. 

This overlap is fleshed out in this essay.