Somehow, that feels like an accomplishment.

First, let me admit that my car (actually a pre-millenial Suburban) is messy.

I have cleaned it out twice this summer, BIG cleanouts. But as I’m learning with my house, big clean-outs are not the answer to clutter problems. It’s those pesky, small-but-consistent clean-outs that make the difference.

Anyway, it’s bad. My three kids are well-trained in the art of taking-turns-opening-doors.  Meaning . . . on breezy days, only open one door at a time lest you create a wind-tunnel effect and your Sunday School papers from last month go flying out into the parking lot.

But I now know, without a doubt . . . . that mine is not the worst. How, you ask, do I know that?

I’ve seen the worst.

I don’t have a picture, which means that I do not qualify as a cut-throat blogger, out for the story. I thought about taking a picture. The reason I looked inside was out of curiosity about why the people walking in front of us had stopped to stare . . . and had taken a picture. I even had a camera with me.

It would have been perfect to post here, but I couldn’t do it. As a slob, I know the fear of one of my own messes being shown to the world by a gawker, without even a chance to come up with a story about how “it’s almost never this bad.”

I post a lot of embarrassing clutter pictures on the blog, but it’s me that’s posting them.

But I will describe it. As I said, we were walking through a parking lot and saw a man and woman stop and look into a car. They stared and stared, and then she got out her camera, took a picture, and they walked on. It was a nice looking car, and I couldn’t imagine what they had been staring at.

And then we walked past, and I glanced in. Like them, I stopped and stared.

Just below window level, everywhere but the driver’s seat, there was trash. Styrofoam cups, containers, napkins, etc. You could not see the seats or the floor or the insides of the doors . . . at all. 

Trash.

The only space in the car not completely filled to the windows with trash was the driver’s seat. The trash in the passenger’s seat would have had to brush against his/her arm, up to the shoulder, while driving.

It was shocking. I honestly thought that it must be some kind of modern art piece, making a statement about society.

But it was just a car in a parking lot.

Part of me wants to analyze how this could have happened, but I’m not going to. I’m not here to talk about others. I’m not here to guess what is inside of someone else’s slob-brain.

I can only share my own struggles, my own thoughts, and my own frustrations. Mostly, I can’t assume that I know how this happened, because there is no possible way for me to know.

And because I know the fear of being misunderstood or misinterpreted or judged because of my own slob-issues, I’m going to stop.