Things of earth...

(quote above is from the hymn, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus by Helen H. Lemmel, 

photo is textured with Kim Klassen's quest)

I'm a stuff kind of gal.

I love my stuff!

I love to putter, to create, to decorate, to rearrange all of my stuff.

BUT...

A couple of times a year I go through the things in the storage closet under our stairs,

the stuff in the garage,

the cupboards,

the closets

and get rid of the things I no longer need or want.

More often than not, these are things that I used to love.

This weekend I did some of that type of purging,

and now the trunk of my car is full of things to give away.

It wasn't very many months ago that I did the same thing,

and again, ended up with the trunk of my car full.

The blue and cream pottery I used to collect, 

a collection of snowmen,

odds and ends,

bits and bobs of stuff,

stuff that I used to love,

stuff that I spent money on.

And now, I'm just tired of it,

so off it goes,

so I can get new stuff,

new stuff to love.

Nothing causes you to face the reality of the meaninglessness of stuff more than death.

For one thing, no one takes their stuff with them when they die.

And for another thing, the reality is that there's a whole lot of your stuff, my stuff,

 that our children and grandchildren just won't want.

Case in point, my father-in-law passed away a number of years ago

and my mother-in-law is in an assisted living home.

She has Alzheimer's.

She doesn't even remember her children and grandchildren very well,

much less her stuff.

And boy, did she have stuff!

She had every greeting card ever given to her.

She had old Sunday School curriculum,

craft projects and supplies.

She had china and tea cups and crystal and linens.

She had stuff, lots and lots of stuff.

Do you know how much of that stuff went into a dumpster when she had to move out of her home?

Then the rest of the stuff went into a storage unit, where monthly rental fees were used to house her stuff...stuff she no longer even remembered.

Her children and grandchildren decided to clear the storage unit out,

to finally deal with all of her stuff.

The teacup in the picture above is one of a few teacups we chose to keep,

some of her crystal goblets,

and her hope chest,

The rest of her stuff will be given to the Goodwill.

The reality of it is, we spend the precious moments, hours, days, weeks, months, years

of our life accumulating stuff that no one really wants.

But the memory verses she taught her son,

the crafts she did with her granddaughters,

the camping trips with her grandsons,

the family dinners that she served on that beautiful china,

the cups of tea shared in those pretty china cups,

the relationships,

those are the things no one can throw in a dumpster.

Those are the eternal things...

what we invest in our relationships with other people,

what we invest in our relationship with God,

what we do for God's kingdom...

this is the stuff that truly satisfies,

the stuff that will last forever,

the stuff you can take with you when you die.

still following,