When we first moved to Piedmont, Sheryl was pregnant with Kyla. The parsonage was empty for several months before we arrived as the congregation worked on restoring it. It was a nice parsonage and was built only about thirteen years before we moved in.
One of the impressive things about that house was all of the storage available to us.
We had a ton of space in the attic. There were large cabinets in the hallway that you could sleep several people in if they were empty. We had closets and book shelves and a shed out back.
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| I see a sign like this and I want to look. What if there's something I need? |
At the beginning of our time, they were empty. We praised the storage many times over.
This kind of storage allowed you to just keep stuff. Stuff you might normally get rid of!
If you had a place for it, why not just keep it?
After two children and over thirteen years of accumulation, we finally filled that house up!
When it was time to pack, I no longer praised the storage. We were moving to a home with far less space and so now we had some choices to make.
We threw away a lot of stuff that we thought we might need.
We made trip after trip to the Goodwill thinking that others might still find it valuable.
One thing we did was improve the attic storage in our new house so that we could fill it with boxes of the things we couldn't bear to part with. The majority of these boxes have been untouched for over a year now.
I don't think that I am overly fond of material things. But I have my share. Someday my kids will inherit a lot of junk. They'll probably throw most of it out.
What does this mean for our life as spiritual people? Do our things keep us from being more Christ-like to others? Do our attachments make us superficial? With apologies to Sting, can we be spiritual people in the material world?
I do know this - I haven't missed any of the things I threw away or gave away. I'm not sure what that says but I think if I pay attention, it might be significant.
In Christ,
Sam
Picture by Ellin Beltz (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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