The little artist

As a Little Thing  last Fall I dragged Kyra’s easel out onto the front porch so that she could paint in the sunshine.  It was a small, simple thing that she loved; it took 2 minutes to bring it out, and 2 minutes to put away later.  It barely took any time or effort for me, but she loved it. 

My friend Nikki over at Joy in the Journey tagged me in a fun little photo game. It’s a lot of fun to see everyone’s pictures. So, since I’ve been tagged, I get to tag some of my friends and try to get them to play along! I tag….

Two weeks ago I was horribly sick for 4 days.  I couldn’t do much but sleep and drink water… and plan.  The mess around the house gets really bad unless I’m harassing the family to ‘pick up,’ and since I was unable to nag about the mess and unable to do anything about it, I lay on the couch with my notebook and decided just how things were going to change once I felt better. 

Once I was over ‘the sickness,’ I spent the next 3 days going through our storage areas, craft bins, closets, and kids rooms getting rid of the excess– by excess I mean things we don’t need to have cluttering up our home.

How to determine what is excess?  I asked myself 3 little questions for every item:

• Do I use this and/or need this? *Note: The question is present tense, NOT future tense:  It’s not will I use this and/or need this at some point in time.*
• Do I love this?
• Do I want to keep picking this item up and putting it away?

 We ended up with 10 recycling bags full of usable items that we took to the Salvation Army, countless bags of trash, plus a large amount of things we put on Craig’s List to try and sell (we made $62 so far!) 

Jesus said in Matthew 6:19-21 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth… but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  If we are spending much of our time taking care of our ‘things’– and I mean cleaning, organizing, shuffling, dusting, and storing our ‘things,’ that’s where our hearts end up.

When we have less stuff, there’s less money spent on it, less time to take care of it, and therefore more time to be used by God and more time to be actively growing closer to Him.  If that’s where our heart is, or where we want it to be, then we have to release the things that hinder us: those little ‘treasures’ that pull our time and hearts away from God. 

I have been amazed by how much less mess there is now that we let go of that chunk of ’stuff.’  It was startlingly time-consuming to keep putting away things or shoving around boxes of things we didn’t even use in order to get to things we do use.  I’m eyeing my china cabinet now– I know there’s lots of odds and ends in there that I don’t want or use.  Hm, maybe that’ll be my Mission next Monday.