Sooner or Later, We’ll Need to Toss Things

Our children tell us that the best gift we can give them is a clutter-free inheritance. We are working on it.

HH and I live in an apartment after living in three houses for the first 33 years of our married life. We have downsized but we also had a storage unit until last week and so we having been tossing things once again. I have parted with my deviled egg plate and about ten tablecloths.

My least favorite boxes to cut open are marked “papers to go through.” Help me Jesus.

While some of the papers are easily tossed into the recycling, some are treasures – at least for one last memory before letting them go:

• A 1989 W-2 form reminding me that I once shared a single $22,000 salary with my co-pastor. We had an infant and were living in one of the most expensive cities in the country. (And now I know why random parishioners left groceries on our front porch.)
• A lovely note from a parishioner in the box of an engraved sterling silver napkin ring given to our newborn that said, “For when you grow up and use a napkin.”
• An encouraging letter from the youth pastor to our then-high school daughter during exam week.

A retired clergywoman once decorated her church study with photographs of each of the babies and young children she had ever baptized during the course of her ministry. I wonder now what she did with all those framed photos. How do you toss photos of babies, even babies whose names you don’t remember?

I learned today that the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore will take all the theology, history, and exegetical books we no longer need, so if you live in the Charlotte area and long to read Phyllis Trible, Phyllis Tickle or Phyllis Bird, there will be some great deals in the local ReStore soon. Slowly, slowly we are clearing out our theological library so that our children won’t have to do it.

Friends, the lessons I’m learning are informative for the local church too.

What does your church need to toss? Do we really need a copy of every worship bulletin since the fire of 1934? Is it okay to give away the self-portrait of the third pastor’s second wife that’s been hanging in the church library for 25 years? And is it time to stop doing the Fall Fun Fair since everybody hates doing it except the couple who’s run it since they joined in 1985?

What are the practices that feed souls? The pastor’s personal letters for baptized babies to open on their 10th birthday. The Christmas Eve Candlelighting Service. The saved written testimonies of long-passed church members about how their faith carried them through the Battle of Iwo Jima or the liberation of Dachau. The oral testimonies by younger members about surviving the loss of a child or enduring the end of a marriage or recovering after a near-fatal illness. We need to keep these.

Dr. Yolanda Pierce says that the difference between trash and treasure is that treasure carries a story. And stories give our lives meaning. If we look at our church calendars and schedules and storage closets, which things give meaning and which simply weigh us down?

There is a lot to be said for traveling lightly through this world, keeping the treasures and relinquishing all the rest.