Where is that smell coming from?!

Yesterday I cleaned out someone else's refrigerator. It has become a weekly tradition, but this week I walked in the doorway and was hit by a particularly rancid smell and knew the job needed to be done. I opened the industrial-sized doors and could have groaned out loud. Bins of food were haphazardly shoved together, and there were open plates and containers of food stacked on top of those. My friend and I started going through the bins one by one, pulling them out and sorting the rotten food from the fresh. It would be difficult to name a culprit of the smell. Perhaps it was the raw ground beef clearly past its expiration date, or any one of the curdled gallons of milk, or possibly the mushy plums dripping juice on the shelves below. And yet, it would not have been easy to find any of these things without digging through the fresh food that had been stacked on top of the rotten.

I wonder, how often do I just bury what is rotten in my heart, leaving it to taint everything there? It had been months, probably years of bitterness toward someone I love festering there. It wouldn't have been obvious to anyone; I had stacked lots of fresh and tasty foods on top of the rancid beef. But it affected my interactions with this person like that fruit fly-infested plum juice dripping on everything beneath it. It wasn't until the refrigerator of my soul started oozing the rank odor of bitterness that I realized I needed to do some deep cleaning. I slowly started unpacking the initial root of hurt that had been left there years before, examining the cause and allowing myself to feel the pain in a way I hadn't before. It wasn't fun, but slowly that putrid smell started to dissipate and my interactions with this person felt less strained. 

Maybe I should start taking weekly inventory of my heart, just like I do that refrigerator. And perhaps I need a friend around to help me from time to time, someone to smell the milk and tell me if it gets to stay or needs to go. What about you? Is there a faint smell leaking from your soul? Is it time to separate the fresh from the rotten? And who can you ask to smell the milk? Let me tell you, cleaning out the fridge is a lot easier when you have someone to help you.