Hoard or Heaven
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven." Matthew 6: 19
When I was in chemotherapy a couple years ago, I had too little stamina for pastoring, so I took the year off. But I had too much stamina to just sit around. What to do?
I was seized by a frantic desire to clean out the basement and all the closets in our 6-bedroom Victorian parsonage. Perhaps it was morbidity: I had been in the homes of too many elderly hoarders, who had consequently died and left their flummoxed family memebers with a house full of, er, memorabilia to deal with.
I didn't want to go out like that! More to the point, I didn't want to live like that. I wanted to pare down, to get to the essential substance of real living, for the rest of my life.
I was ruthless. If I hadn't worn it or used it in the last two years, out it went: the specialty avocado slicer. That tortilla press I bought in Mexico and lugged home, thinking of all the homemade tortillas I would make with my children (not). And about 5,000 slightly crumpled Christmas gift bags that I wasn't, it would seem, going to reuse after all.
That hardest things to get rid of were the things that didn't belong to me. Six of our relatives had lived with us in the parsonage at some point, and all of them had left their own baggage behind. I called them up. "If I live through this, I want to live lighter. Can you please come get your things?" It tokk some of them a while (why have all that house if not to store other people's precious belonings?), but they did.
When the basement was clean, I was overcome with the freedom, the autonomy, the sense of grace that ensued. I love my faqmily. I just love them even more when we're each being responsible for our own stuff. Literally, and metaphorically.
It's conventional wisdom by now that we don't own things; they own us. So why do so many of us still have closets and basements and expensive storage units full of responsibility? Our own and others. Do yourself (and those you will leave behind) a favor: deal with your stuff, one closet at a time, and free yourself to serve God instead of preserve baggage.
God, set me free from the false thinking that my things are who I am. Help me to be responsible for my own stuff, and to help the people I love be responsible for their own stuff, so we can all be as free as you made us to be--and ready for Heaven, whenever. Amen.
Molly Baskette in Senior Minister of First Church Somerville, UCC, in Somerville, Massachusetts.
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