Self Diagnosis

Yeah, so I'm figuring out some things.  I've learned that I will hold on to lots of things that, in all actuality, I will never, ever use.  Oh, I've had some good ideas about uses for certain things, but I'm finding things that have been stashed away for years collecting dust, which brings me to my next point.  The book Stuff mentions that hoarders get to the point of not even noticing the piles around them, the towers of papers and jumbled assortment of bric-a-brac crowding their dwellings, filling out their "caves" or "nests."  Looking at my stuff through the eyes of one seriously motivated to declutter his life, I am starting to see all the total crap I've been toting around for years and years, packing and moving and storing!

And then I have a thought, probably what this whole examination is about:  how much is pent up in my heart that has sat there, collecting dust for years? Piles of good advice about financial practices, diet, exercise, spending time with my Lord...most of which I disregard as easily as the contents of a junk drawer left unconsidered for a score of years. Maybe these new eyes will transfer over to other aspects of my life, not just my array of possessions. Hmm.

Here's a collection of things from Friday and today that have been sitting around waiting for restorations that will never happen:

An old silverware drawer tray that doesn't fit our new drawers. We've seriously had this since our first apartment. 2002, folks. Filled with two watches with dead batteries, another old sales book, and a bottle cap opener from the American Cancer Society. Nice, I know.

This group is funny:  A meat thermometer made obsolete by my purchase of a digital one, an old bag of hermit crab shells from a trip to the beach forever ago, a really, REALLY old ACE bandage (I've been operating under the assumption that these are expensive medical equipment, and not a $4 fix at CVS as apparently they are. This came out of my dad's drawer in 2001 when I sustained a foot injury) and the two lamest so far...the instructions and spare diodes to a radio electric fence from when we lived in Austin, and a ziplock bag with a single button in it. Yeah, I hear ya, "Way to go, Braz, really cleaning out your life there, bud." But here's something insightful to throw back atcha.  How many teeny, tiny, seemingly insignificant "ziplock bag-buttons" are you carrying around in your soul?  Little wounds, small grudges, a curse word here or there, a spiritually dry year, an old unresolved family conflict...one at a time, they may not seem so bad. It's when you pull out a drawer-full and see them all collected there, and you say, "What in the world am I hanging on to all this junk for?!"  So it's in the small things, like a single button in a ziplock bag that will no longer grace the inside of a drawer, that we take our baby steps towards healing, and more importantly, a new way of thinking. "Renew your minds..."  I think I'm getting it.

Peace.