Welcome to the feminine podcast. This is Nancy Wilson.

Thanks for joining me this first week of 2024. Happy New Year. Today the topic is the duty of

tidying up and the many distractions that keep us from it. And I'm not just

talking about tidying up our homes, but also our spiritual lives, our spiritual

house. To tidy is to put things in order. You pick up things of all kinds and put them where they belong.

Perhaps the trash or the dishwasher or the laundry basket and so forth.

And if the house is very untidy after Christmas vacation, as I'm sure most of our homes are or were then you

must have a strategy where shall we begin but one of our temptations is

stall out getting started because we want to take a couple of hours or

days to make a plan. But that is a terrible distraction. It's far better to just attack the

work. Just start at one end of the house and work your way to the other.

That has been my strategy for many years. I start with the main room, the one everyone will see

when they come in the door, and then I just move to the next room and on.

But remember this is not a deep clean. We are talking about tightening up. It's so easy to get

distracted and start doing a deep clean in one corner

when there's so much surface debris that needs to get addressed first.

You may be tempted to start cleaning out kitchen cupboards

when there are still plenty of dirty dishes

from three nights ago stacked up on the counter.

But it's more fun to organize than to scrub.

But you can take time for the reorganization after you've picked up the first layer of debris.

In other words, get the tidying up done first. Then you can move to deep cleaning.

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