The Spiritual Death Cleanse (Part 1)
making room for love
Like the back of my closet, leave life alone long enough, and things start to pile up. Regrets stack up without any effort. Old offenses get shoved into drawers. Broken relationships get put into boxes and labeled, “Do not touch.”
And when things pile up long enough, eventually, someone has to clean it up.
In Sweden, there’s a name for this practice: death cleaning. It’s the process of decluttering and organizing your home, not to beautify or impress, but to lighten the load for those you’ll eventually leave behind. It’s practical, purposeful, and, in a way, quite grace-filled. It’s a final act of care, a way of saying, “I don’t want my things to become your burden.”
Most of us understand the wisdom of clearing out a house before the end of life arrives. The harder question is whether the same thing might be needed in the soul.
If the Swedish death cleanse is about sorting through the things that clutter your house, the spiritual death cleanse is about clearing away the clutter in your heart, made up of all the things that keep you from loving well.
(If you want a deeper look at what I mean by loving well, I wrote about it in the love chapter of Fruitful here.)
This idea of a spiritual death cleanse first took shape while I was writing a devotional called Deathless, preparing for eternal life. I kept thinking about how spiritual health involves letting go of things that quietly take up space in the heart, things like resentment, bitterness, and discontent, and it started to feel less like a single spiritual struggle and more like a kind of clutter, the kind that slowly fills a space until it defines the room.
The longer I thought about it, the more I realized this kind of clearing isn’t only for end-of-life preparations, but belongs to every season, because none of us benefits from carrying what weighs down our ability to love.
So, instead of asking what sparks joy, the spiritual death cleanse asks what strengthens love, a question that exposes things we rarely think of examining: our beliefs, our thoughts, and our relationships. The feelings we rehearse and protect. The grudges we hold. The fears we justify. Some of these seem harmless enough to keep, but they quietly crowd out the love that could have filled their place.
By contrast, a life that is spiritually uncluttered leaves something better than organized belongings. It leaves peace, forgiveness, and a love that was actually lived.
This is the beginning of a short paid subscriber series exploring what a spiritual death cleanse looks like.
