Skip to main content

Getting Rid of Stuff

Do you want to know the best way to be ready to return to work after a vacation? I've discovered it.

Consider this. You've worked for a while (perhaps a long while) to save up money to get away. Family vacations are nice and all, but going anywhere is going to cost you some cash. And for the sake of argument, let's assume you added some extra time off. You won't be at your destination all that time. You just added a few days at home, in order to get some stuff done.

There it is.

You just gave your wife unfettered access to your skills and labor around the house. That garden won't weed itself. The thorough cleaning and reorganization of a kitchen needs a partner, right?

For us, it was cleaning out the garage. Because when you clean out any other area of the house, the garage becomes the new catch-all. Let's just put this stuff we don't want to look at in a bin in the garage.

 Cleaning it out later became cleaning it out now. When moving the vehicle and the bikes out of the garage does not leave a lot of uncluttered space, you know the job needs to be done.

But now the difficult part of the job is deciding what to do with all that stuff.


  • The tools you used once. 
  • The gloves and balls and bats.
  • The wedding gifts you received almost two decades ago. 
  • The toys your kids have outgrown. (Maybe the grand-kids will like this stuff.)
  • The trophy you won for a spelling bee in first grade. (Yes kids, spelling is important.)
  • The graduation caps and gowns. (There might be a costume party, right?)
  • Old pictures and yearbooks. (Seriously, how cute was I?)
Five hours after we started, I was driving a truck-load of stuff to donate. Let it fill someone else's garage. The fact is that we did not need this stuff. We hadn't used it in 20 years. Even some of the stuff we kept was mostly for sentimental value. Very likely, our kids will have to sort through it when we die. We'll consider that payback, I suppose.

It was unnecessary clutter. And if you're looking for the spiritual connection from a pastor, here it is. Go check out Galatians 5 for your spiritual garage. There we find the Apostle Paul talking about freedom from the law, which was simply clutter in the way of our freedom in Christ. 

You'll also read about the acts of the sinful nature, which we've all got a list of. Some of it will bring back memories and some of it will be hard for us to let go of. But if we take an honest look, we'll realize it's just taking up space that could be better used. 

The biggest difference in cleaning out the spiritual garage and getting rid of stuff we don't need there is that we don't need a few days off to get it done. You simply need to partner with God and let Him sort out the junk. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accountable

I recently officiated a wedding. The ceremony was simple, lovely, and ended with another couple professing to keep the covenant of marriage. But it all started with a clarification...from me. At our first premarital counseling session, as I have done with every couple I have agreed to marry, I clarified a couple of matters. First, I officiate Christian weddings, where both spouses-to-be are professing Christians. I firmly believe that marriage is difficult enough, without adding disagreements about God into the mix. Second, as a minister of Jesus Christ, I believe the pastor’s role in a wedding is to represent the blessing of God on that union. So we have several sessions of premarital counseling where we discuss married life. It’s not that I have this imaginary card in my head, with a picture of me on the front and my stats on the back. (You know, like a baseball card.) Ok, I do picture cards. Pastor cards! And being a competitive guy, I want my stats to look good. The number of coupl...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Facebook Maybe

Granted, I'm a pastor. I have Type-A tendencies. Ok, my tendencies border on freakish OCD behavior patterns, but... Few things bother me more than the Facebook 'maybe'. I suppose I could go on and on about the grey areas of our society and the refusal of people to accept absolute standards. I could discuss the great need of people to accept that what is wrong for one person is likely wrong for everyone. I should certainly be concerned about mentioning that someone might have sin in their life. But I don't believe the Facebook 'maybe' is quite sin. Perhaps if I were coming up with new sins, I would add this to the list. But alas... Some might think the Facebook 'maybe' did not exist prior to the Internet, but they would be wrong. When I was in high school and asked a girl out on a date, I would normally be told that if they had no other plans, if nobody else called them, if there was nothing good on television and their hair did not need washing, then per...
5 comments
Read more

Crossing the Lines

I'm sure this has been said before. Certainly I'm not the first to rant about this. I'm positive I won't be the last. And in my usual manner of coming to a story late, I want to comment on Bobby Petrino, recently fired head coach of Arkansas. But this isn't really about Bobby, or I should say, not just  about Bobby. He is simply the latest in a series of stories where big-time athletes, coaches, or celebrities does something stupid and gets caught. But that's not the story, because, quite frankly, we all do dumb stuff. But when too many people get angry, defenders line up to separate the personal life from the professional life. I actually heard a woman quoted, in relation to the Arkansas story, saying that Bobby has won a lot of football games for them. Oh, so that makes it ok?  Arkansas  went 11-2 last season, so the head coach can be immoral? Is that how this is supposed to work? Why draw the line there? If splitting personal decisions from professiona...
2 comments
Read more