by Tammy Tkach Have you ever looked at something so many times you stopped seeing it? As I worked on an issue of Connections (a quarterly journal for elders' wives), I spied a typo. I started giggling as I looked through past issues to see just how far back this particular letter had been missing from a regular and prominent headline. I had to go all the way back to November of 2003! I wish I could say it was someone else's fault (like my proofreaders), but all of us missed it. None in my polite readership brought it to my attention. I was so used to seeing it I didn't really see it. It occurred to me we do this in many areas of life. We develop habits-sometimes obnoxious ones-and we don't even notice what we're doing. We might say something over and over-like, you know, I mean, really-and not realize we give the impression our vocabulary stopped growing in the eighth grade. What's worse, someone can point out such a habit and we make excuses instead of acknowledging the problem and trying to correct it. I have a problem with clutter. My home office seems to be a magnet for papers, books and other items with no other home. I don't know how many times I've cleaned off my desk and the floor around it only to have the papers and books pile up again, seemingly overnight. I get so used to the stuff, I can go weeks without actually seeing the clutter. Then my need to find something will spur me to clean it out. Yes, I've read the books on overcoming messiness, de-cluttering and organization. They don't help unless you actually want to change.   Then something happened to shake my cluttered world-the shelf and rod holding our clothes pulled out of the wall. Everything fell on the floor. What a mess. It took a few weeks to get it fixed and everything put away. So I decided this would be a good time to do a closet purge. I sorted through those clothes I had looked at every day for the last five years and didn't actually see (and hadn't worn). My pile to discard became twice as high as the pile to keep. It felt good to finally have a neat, organized closet. God gives us physical lessons to point out spiritual ones. Mine was merely a closet disaster, and it got me moving. What about our spiritual closets? How many of us need to clean them out and get rid of the sin that clutters our lives and holds us back? This is a good time of year to ask God to show us the less obvious problems in our lives and start to work with the Holy Spirit to make some changes. If not, we could be facing more than a wrecked closet. It took me two years to find that typo and five to clean out my closet. I'm glad God is patient, aren't you?