Week 22
When I was a child I was a Missionette. Much like the more secular Girl Scouts, Missionettes wore uniforms and recited mottoes at the beginning of each of our Wednesday night meetings at the Assemblies of God church. We also earned badges for skills like ironing and babysitting that were meant to prepare us for the stages of life we were moving into. I don’t have many bible verses memorized anymore, but the few I do remember are the ones we recited weekly at those meetings. There’s one in particular that’s been on my mind lately.
Philippians 4:8 says, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
Maybe it was the way this bible verse was presented to me in the context of Missionettes or maybe it was my inability to understand duality at that point in my life, but I interpreted this to mean that we are to dwell on what’s positive in this world and avoid thinking about all that is wrong or bad or hurtful. Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side.
But revisiting this verse now that I’m an adult who hasn’t attended church or ironed anything in years and who is trying to live fully in this world that is both terrible and wonderful, I realize that it’s not about positivity at all. Seeking what’s true and what’s honest and what’s just requires looking straight into all of it, all that’s horrible and all that’s good.
There is no set curriculum for learning how to navigate all the beautiful aspects of life alongside all the suffering. But if we want to live fully we need to figure it out, at least to some degree. If we simply escape into what makes us feel good and deny our connection to anything bad in the world, we aren’t living in truth. If we identify only with pain and hardship, or place the blame for it elsewhere, we’re not living in truth. Truth is a messy mix of it all.
Think on these things.
Going into 2022 it’s difficult not to feel the weight of the messy mix bearing down. Maybe it’s that state of heaviness that’s making me feel this way or maybe it’s the stage of life I’m moving into, but I’m craving order.
When this house became our home all of the previous owner’s belongings came with the package. He’d lived here for twenty years. We brought our belongings into the mix and now we’ve accumulated another twenty year’s worth of stuff. There’s been a steady flow of things coming and going through the years but we’ve reached the point where clutter is keeping us from using our space the way wish to use it. We’ve managed to stash most of it in our garage, but the garage is at capacity.
Now we have to motivate ourselves to do a job that isn’t the most pleasant of jobs and nobody is offering us money or a badge to make it happen. Instead we have to imagine the garage as we want it to be and let that vision of a better, more usable space propel us forward.
We have to step into the cold, cluttered space and start sorting through every single thing that’s in there. Some of those things served us well in the past but are no longer serving a purpose in our lives. Some of those things have sentimental value. Some of those things are just junk and the trouble is not in letting them go but in hauling them away. All of them together have created a task that we’ve put off for too long.
The job is daunting, but I know there are better things ahead if we face the mess and do the work.
It’s true for our garage. It’s true beyond our garage.
It’s a new year and we might as well get started.
Lofty Minded in Alaska 