Our new house has a full basement, about a third of which is unfinished storage space. In the past, Alison and I’s household storage has been limited to closets and the occasional over-garage attic space. This is a whole other league.

As we moved in, it was easy to relegate things to the storage room. Carry the box downstairs and, in the openness, just set it down. Stuff expanded to fill the space it was given. Days into unpacking, the storage room was littered with items, strewn about without rhyme or reason, and leaving me with little room to walk around and a sense of dread every time I opened the door.

With the rest of the house unpacked, last week we turned our attention on this disaster. Shelving was ordered and assembled and, after moving items across the room like a giant version of the puzzle game Rush Hour, we finally got the room under control. It’s a tidy space now, completely different from even just a few days ago.

To get it done, we had to do a lot of shuffling. We moved items from one space to another, from one container to another. It took time, effort, and work, but ultimately nothing was accomplished. Shuffling the items from one wall to the other didn’t get us any closer to our final goal. It felt like progress, but it was an illusion. The concrete step of moving towards completion wasn’t complete until the item was in its new storage space, and we could turn our attention to the next.

This is how we spend too much of our lives. We shuffle, moving things around, without really doing anything to make our lives better. We move laundry day from Monday to Friday, we clear the notification badges on our apps, we switch from evening prayer to morning prayer, but while these feel like progress, they’re not.

The Christian life is anything but boring; it’s chaos. It is a top-to-bottom rejection of the shuffling that most people call “life.” It is an all-in, complete surrender to God’s way not only because He’s the author of life, but because His way is better.

Lent is just a few weeks away; our annual reset. Let’s make a decision this year to change the trajectory of all our tomorrows. Give up on our plans that hold us back, the wedges that separate us from the source of all that is good. Go all in, do things God’s way, and stop wasting life just shuffling things around for absolutely no reason.