I turned the extra bedroom into an office. It’s smaller than I might like but it’s nice to have a dedicated space to read, write, pay bills, organize photos and other family history stuff. I also have my stamp collection spread out in three ring binders by country and they take up a little too much of my bookshelf. When I pull things down and fail to put stuff back the room becomes a mess quickly, especially so because it’s really small. Everything becomes chaotic and I don’t like to look at. I find the neater the office is the more likely I am to use it. When I let it go for a while, I end up having to stop what I’m doing and put things away. I have a shelf for my photo albums. I have a couple extra shelves for my hardback books. I’m using digital ones now so there aren’t too many of them anymore. I had my stamp books on other shelves and then some extra computer peripherals and miscellaneous stuff scattered around. To bring order to my office I have to separate one thing from another. You know the saying: “Everything has a place and everything in it’s place.” 1 Corinthians 14:33 says, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” Benjamin Franklin said, “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” I love when things are clean and organized. It reduces my stress, saves me time and frees my mind to focus on more important tasks.

I think that God ordered the whole universe for us. From the very first chapter of the Bible, we see that God is the God of order. The world was all chaos and confusion and then God stepped in. The Spirit of God was hovering over the confusion of the darkness and chaos and began his work of separating things. On the first day he separated day from night. On the second day, Genesis 1:7 tells us, “And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so.”

It seems like the waters below are the seas and maybe all bodies of water on the earth. The waters above seem to relate more to weather. I have shelves that I keep things on. God has “storehouses.” When God addresses Job, he asks him how much he controls the weather. In Job 38:22 God asks, “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail?” It’s almost as if the Psalmist is correcting Job in a similar way when in Psalm 135:7 he says, “He (God) it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.” God opened the doors to his storehouse and flooded the earth in judgment of the wickedness in Noah’s day. But when he closed the storehouse door, he put his rainbow in the sky as his promise not to open that door again. The last phrase of verse 7 is “and it was so.” The rainbow is a reminder that God has dispelled the chaos once again and has brought order to the world. I love it when I see a rainbow. It reduces my stress, frees my mind from fear and lets me focus on more important things.