Introduction

The New Year is a time to start over and get organized. The holiday season has come and gone and now it is time to clean up all the stuff that has been stashed in a closet. It is also a good time to look at the closets of our life and clean them out, to let God take away the old and keep what is useful for His service.

Decorations

Display a variety of hangers, storage containers and baskets around the room.

Program Ideas

Whose Closet Is This?

Invite the women to take pictures of their closets at home and display them around the room. At the end of the meeting ask them to guess whose closet appears in the pictures.

Speaker

Invite a professional organizer or closet designer to share tips with the women. Check the Internet for companies in your area.

Websites

The following are websites with great ideas for closet organization: www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/organizing-tips/tips/g911/closet-organization-ideas/

http://www.hgtv.com/remodel/interior-remodel/5-steps-to-organizing-your-closet

This Works For Me

Invite the women to share any organizational tips that have worked well for them in their home.

Service Project Ideas

Closet Organization

Clean and organize closets or storage rooms around the corps building. Be sure to have the supplies and storage containers needed to accomplish this project.

Local Shelter

Check with a local shelter to find out some of their needs. Compile a list of these items and distribute it to the women. Ask them to check at home to see if they have any items they could donate. Emphasize that the items should be clean, gently used and in good working order. Set up a date when the group could deliver the donated items to the shelter and hold a joint program with their clients.

What’s In Your Closet?

When I was a child, Saturday was always our cleaning day. My sisters and I would have to clean our rooms before we could go out and have fun. Of course, we always made the project much harder and longer than it had to be. One particular Saturday my sister and I decided we were going to outsmart our mother. We took everything that was scattered about the room and stacked it all in our closet and shut the door. Well, needless to say, mom was not fooled. She opened that closet and everything fell out. Now not only did we have to clean it all up the correct way, we were grounded for the day.

How often do we try the same thing in our spiritual lives? We stack and shove the messy things of our lives away into our mental closets, hoping that they will be forgotten or better yet, just completely disappear. We try to hide away little white lies, gossiping, hurt feelings, unforgiveness, all the sins that can come into our everyday living, which we don’t want others to see. We skip our prayer and devotional times and allow the world to show us how to handle these sins.

When my mother came to inspect our room that Saturday, she reminded us that the closet was also a part of our room. Psalm 84:1 begins, “How lovely is your dwelling place.” It doesn’t add “except for the closets.” Our entire dwelling place needs to be lovely. Our lives need to be clean and neat in all areas. When we make a mess of our dwelling place, when we sin and we become unlovely, we need to stop and do what is necessary to make it right. We need to clean the entire room. Perhaps we need to start with the closets, the hidden areas of our life, the parts we hope no one will ever see. But God sees everything and knows everything about us. He wants us to be able to show every aspect of our lives to others and in so doing help others to grow spiritually.

First John 1:9 states, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” This means even the sins we shove into the closet and hope no one will find out about. He wants us to confess our sins to Him so that He can cleanse us.

Hand out slips of paper and invite the women to write down some of the things that they need to work on in their lives, those areas that they need God to take control of. Invite those who feel led to share what they wrote. After a time of prayer for guidance and forgiveness, invite the women to throw their papers into a trash can to symbolize cleansing of their lives.

As a united closing prayer, have everyone read together Psalm 84:1–4.