Sunday Selah

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

Matthew 6:26

I've been spending some serious quality time in my garage.

And cabinets.

And closets.

And toy room

I'm trying to clean-out and declutter.

Oh.My.

I read all the websites and blogs dedicated to getting oneself organized. I study the IKEA catalog as if it will help me perform brain surgery. I cull, toss, sort, categorize, strategize, measure and try.

Oh, do I try.

But there's not a lot of household organization tips out there when you're managing a household of ten.

And then there's the part where I'm sentimental/creative/frugal/distracted. You know, your basic recipe for Clutter Cake.

I'll hang on to the strangest things, believing I'll one day re~purpose them. And the kicker is, I often do. Which makes it harder to toss stuff. When you actually do creatively re-use things in a new and fresh way.

Mike always says I use every part of the buffalo.

But there's also a scent of fear to some of it. Fear that I'll lose the memory the object reminds me of. Fear I'll need the item again and instead of looking like a super-prepared girl scout, I'll actually have to go hunt a new one down at the store. Fear that I'm not being a good steward. Fear that I won't be honoring the finances that went into the object.

Fear. Fear. Fear.

I think we often think of materialism in this country as an expression of greed. And I'm sure that's true in some cases. But when I find myself carefully boxing up and hanging on to a collection of worn-out soccer cleats in case financial times are tough when 7 or 8 of 8 is ready to play soccer and needs a pair of size 13 1/2 cleats, it's not about wanting to have the biggest worn-out soccer cleat collection in the county.

It's about fear.

That line where good stewardship and planning crosses over into not trusting that the Lord can show up with soccer cleats whenever we need them. That fear that if I don't hang onto a sentimental object, He's not keeping up with the scrapbook of my life. That fear that if I don't have the widest range of toys available to my children at any given whim, I am somehow shortchanging their childhoods, instead of trusting Him to give them exactly what they need when they need it.

So I'm continuing my decluttering. But it seems the first thing I need to toss out, not donate, not hand-down, not re-puropose, is this little tacky object called fear.

Selah.