Stuff

Do you ever become overwhelmed by an overstuffed closet? Have you found yourself frustrated looking for things in your out-of-control “junk drawer”? Proverbs 14:1 says, “The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish pulls it down with her hands.” Could one way of tearing down a house be by keeping too many things?

Stuff weighs on us and actually prevents us from being content and peaceful. Too much clutter prevents us, as women, from doing the more important things in our lives, such as serving our families, our Church, and, most importantly, God.

Jesus warned us against wanting to hold on to our possessions: “Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses” (Luke 12:15). The care and upkeep of our possessions could be taking away time that would be spent more productively.

My husband and I lived in several different houses as we raised our four children. In the early years, he managed farms, and we were usually blessed with a home to live in along with each job. After a few years, he started working for a farm management company, and his main job was to keep a farm in decent shape until someone came along to buy it. Usually, this process would take around four years. With four children, we were packing, moving, and getting rid of things we did not really need because we never knew how big the next house would be. This process was not easy.

Like most families, we would host dinners, get-togethers, family celebrations, and activities with the children. We each had our own collections of stuff, and over the years, as our children grew and moved out—usually without their collections—we found that we had accumulated a lot of stuff that we were still boxing up and moving with us wherever we went.

As we became older, we found that we could not physically move so much stuff by ourselves. Scripture says that everything should “be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40), and it was time to get things in order. We looked around and saw stuff that we did not want to burden our own families with when it was time for us to move to a smaller home or when we died.

In her book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, Margareta Magnusson suggests that when we are 65 years of age, we are still young and healthy enough to start the process of downsizing without needing a lot of help from our families, our friends, or home organizers. Of course, you do not have to be retired to start this process—decluttering your home is something people of all ages can appreciate. Even children can learn to sort out the toys or clothes they no longer need or want. And if they have someone in mind to whom they can give their things, that is even better. Ecclesiastes 3:6 says that there is “a time to gain, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away.”

Do not let having many goods bring you to the same point the young man in Matthew 19:22 had to face; he wanted to enter the Kingdom of God, but he could not bear to sacrifice his possessions to do so. Matthew 6:19–20 says, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

While the Proverbs 31 woman is out gathering and acquiring land and wares, she is looking to the needs of her household and the needs of her community—not acquiring unnecessary items that are not helpful to that objective. We should enjoy the gifts we receive through the years, and we should make effective use of the things we are given by sharing them for various activities. But we should also remember that they eventually consume a lot of space and add to collections of stuff. We should not be afraid to give or throw them away after they become less useful. Questions we can ask ourselves are: Does this stuff fulfill my needs at this time in my life? Have I used it within the last few years? Is it becoming a burden to me to take care of by using up too much of my time in maintenance? These questions can help us to lighten our load and spend more time on greater priorities, giving us peace of mind and freeing up our time to spend with our friends and our families.

By simplifying our lives now, we show love for our families—and we can spend our later years enjoying them instead of our stuff. This is another way we can follow the instruction in Matthew 6:33 to “seek first the Kingdom of God.”