Junk

My wife and I are planning to move soon. Our house is for sale and we have a contingency contract on another house in the same town. Preparing to move is stressful. I have to do all those chores that have been backing up. You know, all the maintenance and repair items that I wouldn't do for us, but that I must do in order for someone else to buy the house. That's a hard concept for me to figure out.

One of the chores I have to do is to clean out the basement and garage so the house will appear less cluttered. It's been a while since I've done a good clean out in the basement and garage. As you might expect, there was a lot of junk in both. There is old furniture that is 'not bad enough to throw away, but not good enough to put in the living part of the house'. There are old clothes that are 'not ready to give to the Goodwill, but don't really fit any more'. On and on it goes.

I found lots of other junk as well. Old toys that our kids have outgrown; old repair items that I don't really need anymore, old shoes, and more.

As I was doing this cleaning, I thought about how we also carry a lot of junk around with us in our hearts. We carry around baggage of old relationships that went bad. We find the junk left over from unforgiveness. We find hurts that haven't healed. We find disappointments (many times disappointments in ourselves) that are still in our hearts.

Keeping junk around has a price. I was amazed at how roomy our basement felt after it was cleaned out, and how our cars really will fit in the garage if it's not full of junk. Junk in our hearts has a price, too. We spend countless amounts of energy carrying our junk around. It's heavy. How much lighter would our loads be if we could forgive old hurts? How much lighter would they be if we could forgive ourselves for the disappointments in ourselves? What a lighter load we could carry around with us if we just let these things go; take them to the dump if you will.

You know, we can carry a grudge for years and the other guy may not even know we're mad at him. We could spend hours and hours worth of energy and 25 points on our blood pressure working on these grudges; and the other guy wouldn't even know. What a price we pay to carry a grudge!

My challenge from this is to be able to take the junk out of my heart and leave it at the dump when I take the junk from my garage. Can I leave my heart junk at the dump, too? How much freedom can I gain from leaving it there?

I struggle with getting rid of my junk. I would much rather get rid of the junk in my garage than to deal with the junk in my heart, but I think the freedom that comes with getting rid of my heart junk will make it all so worth while. I'm going to try to get rid of my heart junk; to forgive others and to forgive myself.