So, for the last two months, my life has been pretty well consumed with purging, organizing, packing and moving. What started as a "hmmm...I wonder if we could ever get out of this house and this suffocating mortgage..." conversation with Jeffrey turned into renters for our house and a new house in the mountains for us to rent for $1300 a month less than we were paying on our house. God's provision was evident and now we are moved in, relatively unpacked, we've painted all of the living spaces in my favorite colors, we're close to our dear friends, living on the seventh hole of the golf course and loving the peace, the quiet and most of all, the amazing and sovereign provision of God. Along with this journey has come much time to think and process amongst the craziness of it all.
Our previous house was about 2800 square feet and the house we are living in now is 1900 square feet. We've gone from 5 bedrooms to 3, from multiple living spaces to 1 living space and from being able to be separated in the house to pretty much living on top of one another. There's some adjusting to do! We had to get rid of a lot of stuff and FAST. We had a garage sale, took countless trips to Goodwill and made what seemed like even more trips to the dump. How did we accumulate so much stuff??? Amazingly, the garage at our new house is still FULL of even more stuff that I can't wait to rid us of. It seems to never end. "Why am I keeping this?" "Why have I moved this same item, in this same box, to every house we've ever lived in?" "How many times am I going to move this before I actually OPEN it?" Though I'm tempted to think that I'm the only one who's having these questions, I've been assured through this process that I'm not. I can tell you this though...I WILL NOT REST UNTIL IT IS PURGED!
My children have had to make the adjustment from each having their own rooms and a separate playroom to all sharing a room and not having a playroom at all. We had a big long talk about why Mommy and Daddy were moving us, how fortunate they were to all get to room together and what fun it was going to be. You know what? It's actually worked! They haven't even had a hiccup. The best part? BUNK BEDS. I am now the world's foremost endorser of bunk beds. Whenever you find yourself with a space issue, I recommend them. Whenever you need to make a rooming situation fun, they're your go-to. When you can't spread out, spread up! Maggie and Jack are in bunk beds and Ali's little toddler bed is close by. There wasn't even an argument about who was going to have the top bunk. They had a little meeting and decided amongst themselves without a bit of arguing. We have three chests of drawers in there and a closet. That's about all that will fit in the room and it looks so cute. Now, before you think that I'm bragging about the fact that I have the world's most well-adjusted and perfect children...let me assure you...I am :-)
Through this process I've realized that I can live with SO MUCH LESS. We don't even miss all of the things we sold, donated and trashed. I can't even tell you what most of it was! Amazingly, I've never gone to look for something only to realize that I got rid of it. That's how much stuff we had and didn't need. And we still do. I have to tell you that much like a good book that you can't put down, or the inability to eat only one potato chip, the purging process is quite addicting. It's the good kind of addicting though because it elevates more and more the things that are truly important and diminishes quickly the junk and trash.
Speaking of junk...
We've had a red bowl on our counter for the past three years. It sat right in the middle of the bar, right in the middle of our kitchen and it matched perfectly. It's from Crate and Barrel and it's one of my favorite items. It's purpose has been to act as a catch-all for junk. You see, I'm pretty compulsively neat, but living with four other people who are not has made me find ways to compromise and adjust. One of those ways was by having a junk bowl. I can't stand little things lying around here and there. The way that I broke the family of that habit was by giving them a place for those things to go. EVERYTHING has at some point spent a period of time in the junk bowl. Paperclips, loose change, Ali's hair bows, Maggie's pencils, old receipts, gum wrappers, fast food restaurant toys that nobody really wants, chapstick, guitar picks, Jack's matchbox cars, CDs with no cases, lose keys...you name it, it's spent time in the junk bowl. Then, we moved.
The junk bowl has yet to be unpacked. It also has nowhere to be in the new kitchen. The counter space is such that there's no central place for it. We've lived here two weeks now, and you know what? We haven't missed it! Things actually get thrown away or put where they're supposed to go when there's no junk bowl. I don't get to a point every month or so where I have to spend 20 minutes cleaning out the bowl and putting everything where it goes or throwing it out. I'm loving the prospect of using the bowl for what it was actually intended for. FOOD!
There's a spiritual application here of course. Surely you knew there would be. I've realized that I have junk bowls in my life. Areas that I don't clean out regularly. I let junk build up in these areas that should've been thrown away long ago. We all have them, I think. Friends that we freely gossip with, those that we let our foul language loose around, food that we know we shouldn't eat but overindulge in instead, disrespectful attitudes and speech that we use with our spouses, but wouldn't ever expose to others. All of these are junk bowls and they're unnecessary. Whereas in the physical sense, my junk bowl caused me to have to spend more time than necessary sorting through it all, spiritually speaking, a junk bowl can keep us from the level of intimacy with Christ that we should strive for and it gives Satan a pre-determined area (or areas) of weakness in our lives. It opens us up to temptation and short-circuits the holiness process.
I'm taking steps to get rid of the spiritual junk bowls as surely as I got rid of the physical one. I'm asking the Holy Spirit to convict me of things BEFORE I throw them in my spiritual junk bowl. Dealing with them as they come and throwing them into the trash eliminates the possibility of keeping them around. I'm far from having this process completed and probably always will be. I can already see the benefits though. Do you have any junk bowls? I recommend getting rid of them. We can and should live with so much less junk. I think I'll go make some salad in my favorite red bowl....if i can just find which box it's in...
peace.
