Purging

Conventional de-cluttering wisdom says to get rid of anything that you haven't used in a year. Oh my! Once I started on the furniture re-arrangement project, I realized that I had boxes and boxes of stuff that had not been opened in several years; they were waiting quietly for recognition in the room that had become a catch-all, but is now going to have a more useful life. I had a hard time believing that just because I had not opened the boxes meant there was nothing of value in them. Hence the re-organization project with an actual designated place for what I must keep.

I did run across something helpful, notes from some wise person who said, "Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful, or precious." That seems like good advice. Lots of things were no longer useful to me, or even had never been; at one time I thought I needed them but they were still in their original packaging. Not too many things demanding to be kept were visibly beautiful, but some were beautiful expressions of love and understanding. And then there were the precious things: a four-year-old's crayoned drawing for grandma, crosses which I have been intending to display, brought back by friends who visited Belgium and Ireland and Israel, and those scrapbook pages and photos I mentioned in an earlier post. Even so, I still had the entire rear of my hatchback vehicle filled with goods to be donated. (And I have, in fact, already been there and done that.)

So I've talked about things to keep and things to give away, how about the things to throw away? Oh yes, big bagsful! And I learned something important when it came to that: Some things are not meant to be revisited. There were a bunch of old letters from an erstwhile friend, and I was tempted to put them aside to re-read, but I clearly felt that was not the thing to do. It is hard enough work lifting boxes and sorting through them without adding the burden of remembering a particularly difficult time in my life. "But what if I need . . . ?"

There is a good illustration for this: After a person gets better, he/she doesn't frame the bloody bandages from the accident or gold-plate the crutches used after surgery just in case they might be needed again. "Forgetting the past," the Apostle Paul called it, "and looking forward to what lies ahead." (Philippians 3:13)

MaryMartha

Art from http://www.sxc.hu/