Two nights ago I was in the younger girls room helping them go through all of their things
and get their room real organized. I started out helping little Chia. She had many bags and boxes under her bed that needed to be sorted through. While going through her things with her, I realized that most of the stuff were needing to be trashed, but of course I couldn’t just grab all of her things and dump them because she cares about it. We spent a lot of time deciding what was going to be kept, and she ended up being able to fit all of the things she kept in just one bag as opposed to the 6 boxes she had had to start with.
At one point, there wasn’t much of the floor that wasn’t covered by clothing and a large trash pile. Side not: I’m not trying to say that the kids are hoarders and they have all this abundance of junk, there is just 7 girls to the room and they were all going through their things at the same time, hence the mess. Anyways, it was all very overwhelming but also satisfying to organize everything. After helping the little girls, I gathered all of the trash in the center of the room and started trying to figure out the clothes situation. I looked back at the trash pile and noticed that Chia was going back through it after having spent close to an hour with her deciding what we were going to get rid of. I then just grabbed all the trash and took it outside so no temptation to take things back out would come back up.
The thing that stuck out to me the most after those two hours was when Chia started going back to the trash pile just to check and see if she actually wanted some more of the things. I had to get that pile out of there before more things were taken out. In my mind those things were clearly stuff that were not worth keeping and they weren’t going to use hardly ever. I felt that I had already been pretty generous with some of the things that she had kept, but to her it was hard to let go of those things. Why is it that we hold on so tightly to things that we don’t need and that are taking up so much space that we don’t have room for the things we actually need?
Is it possible that there is a limit in our heart and mind for the things that we can hoard in there? The Bible talks about letting God have our hearts, purify them, cleanse them, and even let Him remove some unnecessary junk. That sounds uncomfortable to me. The idea of going through everything that I posses in my heart and mind and dumping some things sounds overwhelming. I almost rather just stuff those things in a corner and not think about it, which sounds lazy or wrong, but deep down inside that is the route that a lot of us choose. Luckily, God is gracious enough to be patient and not just leave us alone to live in the mess. The funny thing is that we let God help us clean up, live in that for a bit, then fall back into bringing in some more junk. Our hearts are the most valuable possession we have, hence why God and Satan seek it out so much. Knowing that, I think it’s worth letting God help us clean it up and keep it pure.
