There was a time when cleaning your clutter was fairly straightforward. You could look around the house and see what needed to be cleaned. You could open the garage and see the clutter. You could clean out a desk drawer, organize a closet, or throw away a stack of papers. If it was there, you could see it. If you could see it, you could clean it.

But increasingly, some of the biggest clutter in our lives is invisible. It lives in the digital Cloud. While our physical possessions are limited by physical space, our digital footprint continues to expand at the rate of our online storage subscriptions.

I just checked my Cloud photo library, and it contains 30,002 photos and videos. In addition, I have thousands of emails in online folders amounting to more than ten gigabytes of data. Documents and files on just one of my home computers consume 204 Gigabytes of storage. There are abandoned accounts, and Cloud backups of devices we no longer use. Then there are messages, files, etc. on my phone amounting to more than 320 Gigabytes of storage. That's clutter y'all.

Eventually, the attic, basement, and garage get full. Digital storage, however, is different because the Cloud doesn't look full. There's no pile on the floor. There are no overflowing filing cabinets. There are no closet doors that won't close. Digital clutter simply accumulates somewhere we cannot see. That's what makes it so difficult to clean. And when we pass, someone will have to either figure out how to find our digital mess and clean it or simply forget about it forever. It's easy not to clean what you cannot see.

And maybe that's true of life, too. There are things we carry that don't show up in the rooms we physically occupy, such as lingering addictions, old hurts, unfinished conversations, unforgiven offenses, regrets, fears, and habits. These are the things we stopped dealing with because they were easier to leave somewhere in the background of daily life and in the deep recesses of our heart. These unseen things don't take up physical space, but they can take up an enormous amount of mental and spiritual space.

Maybe we need to do more than clean out the garage or delete files from the Cloud. Maybe it's time to take an inventory of what we've been storing in our heart where nobody can see it, but we can feel it.

Some things don't need to be organized or simply deleted. Rather, they need to be forgiven, surrendered, confessed, healed, or handed over to God.

The hardest cleaning we will ever do may be the cleaning nobody else can see. And perhaps that's exactly why it matters so much to us.

Do you have some clutter to declutter today?