Purge

1/25/2005


I finally had an opportunity to complete a project I began a few weeks ago right before a lot of drama started taking place in and around my life. The exciting undertaking was…ta da…purging the junk that has accumulated in my closets and desk drawers. I was amazed at times at what I choose to hang onto. I found newspaper clippings that were not of interest for me today, slips of paper with telephone numbers and no names (I’m not bold enough to dial the ‘important’ digits to find out which possible friend would answer the line). I even found useless store receipts and junk mail.

From the closets I was met (again) with an ugly bright orange shirt some uninformed family member gave as a gift a couple of years ago. I also came across other clothing items I’ve held onto not because I liked the article but because it was given to me and I felt some weird sense of loyalty which has caused me to rescue the items from the annual Goodwill bag time after time.

As I was crowding my living room floor with the little piles of ‘stuff’, another focus came to mind like how representative these little mounds are of life – mine and I’m sure of yours. I especially thought about those things that I hung onto that have no meaning today yet in some yesterday, meant so very much. They are like the shallow old memories we hold onto. They may be hurts or conflict which no longer have any substance – we cannot remember why we are mad at so-n-so, it’s just become habit to carry it around with us wherever we go.

Then I thought about things the ugly shirt represents. For me, it was a ‘bad’ relationship I purged last year after realizing the satchel had gotten way too heavy for me to carry any longer. Not wanting to hurt the other person, I held on for too long out of some mislaid allegiance. An obvious outcome of eradicating the bad objects is that it freed up space to allow what is good, and lovely, and beneficial to come into my life.

Next was all the ‘shit’ one keeps…like bills I can’t wait to be paid in full. I looked at this pile before filing the papers away and admitted that there are issues I’m probably never going to be able to reconcile until Jesus comes. That’s humbling for a person like me. I want to fix everything, desires everyone to be happy, and have every problem relieved. Thank goodness God is stronger than my insistent complexities.

Finally, I had to make a special place for all the poetic lines, half finished poems and songs, life observation notes, etc…who knows what those scraps of paper may developing into down the road?

So, my home is organized again. Not perfect (damn!) but I’m more aware of what’s here now. In the end, I don’t think I’ll be able to look at the task of purging my piling stacks of junk the same way again.

zss

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