Salsa and sweet tea can reveal a lot.
This past Thursday, a couple of hours before chorus rehearsal, I opened the refrigerator and discovered that two large cups of sweet iced tea – whose placement had not involved my counsel – had spilled sometime earlier.
Now, life being what it is, of course they didn’t spill on the bottom shelf. Nooooo, they spilled from the top shelf, all the way down to the veggie bins.
I still don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe the day before. Maybe several hours earlier. Long enough, at least, for the sticky tea to travel downward, pooling beneath containers and settling into places nobody notices until they have to.
Naturally, I discovered all this right before our afternoon meal. There I stood, already tired, running on low blood sugar and trying to decide whether to do a quick cleanup or tackle the whole mess properly.
I tackled it properly.
Out came the shelves. Out came the deli drawer. One by one, everything had to be washed, dried and returned. By this time, thankfully, Hubby had become involved, but by the time we finished, I was completely drained. I even ended up asking our other assistant director to handle the most active of our physical warmups at chorus that evening.
But somewhere in the middle of all that cleaning – all that chaos – I made an unexpected discovery.
For weeks, I had been wondering about a half-pint jar of homemade salsa I had gotten from my beloved “Jelly Lady.” I knew I hadn’t eaten all of it – or at least I thought I hadn’t – yet I couldn’t find it anywhere. But suddenly, there it was, tucked behind other items in a corner of the fridge, hidden until the tea catastrophe forced me to start removing things shelf by shelf, item by item.
And that wasn’t the only thing I found.
While digging deeper than we had in quite some time, we also came across some old Kodak Ektachrome slide film stored in the cold years ago and long forgotten. My husband – the artist who carefully documents his work – didn’t even remember it was there.
Funny how a mess can uncover things. Later, after the frustration had passed and my energy had finally returned, I found myself thinking about how often this happens spiritually as well.
Most of us don’t welcome interruption. We don’t ask for upheaval, inconvenience or exhausting detours at the end of an already long day. Yet some of the deepest spiritual discoveries come during seasons when life has spilled over its neat little boundaries and sent us searching through places we have neglected for far too long.
A verse from Psalm 139 came quietly to mind: “Search me, O God, and know my heart.”
Real searching is rarely superficial.
I also realized: Sometimes God gently reveals blessings we thought were gone. Sometimes he uncovers neglected areas that need attention. Sometimes he brings forgotten memories back into view. And sometimes he simply cleans places we have ignored because dealing with them felt too overwhelming or inconvenient.
The tea spill certainly inconvenienced me. Still, had it not happened, the missing salsa would probably still be missing. The refrigerator would still need cleaning. The old slide film would still be sitting unnoticed in its dark corner. Who knows? Maybe I would have missed the reminder altogether.
Romans 8:28 says that “all things work together for good to them that love God.” Not just the easy, orderly things. Sometimes even sticky, aggravating refrigerator messes can carry a little grace inside them.
Looking back, I think what exhausted me most that evening was not the cleaning itself. It was the unexpectedness of it all – the way one small discovery suddenly led to another and another. But sometimes that’s how God works in our lives, too.
One thing spills. Another gets uncovered. And eventually, we realize he’s been quietly cleaning deeper places all along.
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Sallie Rose Hollis lives in Ruston and retired from Louisiana Tech as an associate professor of journalism and the assistant director of the News Bureau. She can be contacted at sallierose@mail.com.
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