How much are the things you love worth? Your bookshelves? Your blender? Your bed?
How do you place a value on the items you’ve shared space with? The couch where your kids find your lap. The table your husband and sons built with their own hands. The basket you’ve folded your babies’ clean diapers into for six years. How can a number sum up the intimate details of the moments– both mundane and sublime– that knit themselves together into the fabric of a family’s life?
I am not a “stuff” person. I am not a gatherer of trinkets or a collector of knick knacks. I don’t dream of a new couch, or covet better artwork for my walls. And yet, the things that are in my home are beloved. Years ago, I made a commitment to purge our space of the things that seemed to simply flow into our lives through happenstance, but were neither especially necessary nor particularly us. I stopped saying yes to hand-me-down dressers that weren’t quite what I had in mind, worn couches that didn’t match, and new-to-us bookshelves that didn’t make me smile. Instead, I purposefully curated a small, meaningful little menagerie of home stuffs that came together to make our entire family comfortable, cozy, and united in our unique, quirky style. Yes, we have only one couch and chair to seat our entire family. But they are our couch and chair. Not fancy. Not even near expensive. But ours. Yes, our dining room chairs are an eclectic, motley mix of colors and shapes. But they work for us. And we are blessed through them.
Now it’s time for nearly all of these things to go. Not just the items that really didn’t mean much anyways– the plain glass vase that served a purpose but didn’t make anyone’s heart beat faster, the blender that could be replaced in the blink of an eye. No: now it’s time to say goodbye to the precious things, the special items, the stuff that makes our house a home.
Our school bookshelves, which have carried books from the days of The Story of Ping to The Story of Christianity. Sold. The magazine racks that have hung above my older boys’ beds, keeping Bibles and Lego manuals close. Sold. Birdie’s little white wardrobe. Sold.
These things are, as a friend said, just things. And my heart will not shatter into a million pieces to know that they are not there, occupying space in my living room, my kitchen, my hall. And yet, as they slip away, I feel a sweet, unfamiliar ache that reminds me, again and again, that I have no home here.
I am now, more than ever, an alien in this land.
God has been steadily peeling the layers of the onion of my soul for the better part of a decade. This newest stripping is just another step, another reminder that this world is not my home. That I am now engaging in a physical transition that ultimately mirrors everyone’s floating between the here and now and the world to come. I am trying to embrace it, trying to find joy in the opening of my hands. But I have to be honest: it hurts. This release is the most painful one yet– the one where I admit that this place is just a place, these walls are just walls, but my spirit? My future?
It belongs to the Lord.
Please pray for and with us as we say yes, daily, to God’s call. It is a beautiful gift, being asked to serve. But it comes with a cost. We are living a taste of that price now.