An Uncluttered Life

Wow! It is amazing how much stuff (insert trash, garbage, clutter, useless trivial accumulation) you can collect over almost 30 years of marriage.  I am finally, after 6 months of living in our new house, going through some of the bins in the garage and deciding what is useful, necessary, and worth keeping.  This weekend, we are going to do the only honorable thing and have a garage sale so that our useless, unnecessary, and worthless things can be stored in someone else's garage for a while.  For instance, I found a pair of pants from when Shelley and I were first married.  I can still get them on, but I'm not sure what to do with the other leg.  Chelsea's Little Mermaid Halloween costume from when she was six has seen its better days. I have 9 cubic feet of phone chargers, power adapters, and wiring from a myriad of technological marvels that very soon will be qualified for the Antique Roadshow.  So this week will find me out in the garage in the wee hours of the morning, making life and death decisions about whether to keep the broken lawn mower and turn it into a yard ornament, take it to the dump and pay to get rid of it, or try to sell it to someone who thinks that $10 for a lawnmower is a great price, even if they have no idea what is wrong with it or how to fix it.
The clutter that plagues my garage is really just a symptom of a malady that I think all of us suffer from to one extent or another.  It is the tendency to look at a situation and say, "I can't deal with this right now, so I'll store it away until later."  Many of the things that I will toss in the trash this week have been sitting in my garage or my storage building, untouched and for the most part unseen, for years.  I should have thrown them away when I bought their replacement, but instead, I stored them, thinking that one day I might find a use for them.  We do this with all kinds of things in our spiritual lives as well.  We get wounded by the actions of someone else and instead of going to them and talking it out and getting the issue resolved, we say, "It's just too fresh right now.  I can't deal with it."  Then we pack it away in our heart and it just sits there and takes up space.  Before long, our hearts are so cluttered with past hurts and unresolved frustrations that we cannot function effectively.
I'm sure that I will find a few things that I have been looking for and that I will be able to put to some useful purpose.  They have just been lost in the clutter.  The same thing happens when we unclutter our hearts.  God is able to bring things back to our mind that we have long forgotten.  He is able to refresh and renew our daily walk with Him.  And suddenly we can find a little bit of order in the chaos.
Our Saturday night Bible study on the book, Returning To Holiness, by Dr. Greg Frizzell, is helping us to work on this process as well.  We are looking at the Scriptures that deal with seven specific categories of sin that tend to clutter our lives and grieve and quench the power of the Holy Spirit.  As we go through this process of dealing with the biggest monsters in our closet, we are beginning to see the freedom that comes from dealing with the clutter.  It is a refreshing feeling.
This weekend's garage sale is just a preliminary attempt to work on this problem.  The real test is going to be seeing if I can resist using the money we make to go out and buy more stuff to replace the stuff that we sell.