We test the air with our forearms and lungs and, finding it fair, we open the windows letting the Spring come in. Beds are stripped and chairs are set upside down atop tables, the house smells like pine and lemon scented cleaners and we dive in recklessly.

Spring Cleaning. It's my favorite time of the year, really. More than Christmas with its cheery ambiance and family togetherness or the dead of summer when we sit on the side porch until too late listening to crickets and silence. Spring cleaning, that first warm, free day when with abandon we are singularly focused on clearing every space of stuff so the air can permeate into the drifts that winter left behind.

I stare out the window at the six inches of snow still encircling our tree trunks, leveling our porches, lining our streets and think that even on March 1st, Spring Cleaning still feels a long way off.

This isn't about sweeping dust and winter salt, making piles of laundry and airing out down-comforters. This is about the Spring Cleaning of our Souls.

My Soul has grown accustomed to the heavy covers of winter, blanketed in down and snow, bedded and hidden from even my sight. It's been so long since I've opened the windows and breathed, taking inventory of the ugliness and the dank and ridding my heart of both.

My Soul affects my Mood and my Mood, dear friends, has been riding waves of the tumultuous sort. James wrote about the sort of person who is like those waves, the kind of person who doubts. And while my mood may seem like the aftereffects of a long winter or misshapen plan, the truth is that my mood is the direct effect of "not believing and thus doubting."

So this morning, while our tears mingled and I acknowledged the winter of my Soul, while I said I was sorry for my Mood, and I really was, all I could think about was the need for some Spring Cleaning. To reach into the deepest parts, or maybe start with the surfaces, or maybe the order doesn't matter at all, but to reach in and begin sorting out. To inflict character and righteousness and humility and belief on all those winter-worn areas.

To fling wide the windows, air out the smell of sleep, scrub deeply the recesses, and let the sun shine in.