Don't tell my dad, but.....

I have a lot of stuff....clothes, books, shoes, clothes. And I feel like I am pretty good at ridding myself of excess now, or at least better than I was before Katrina (That's how our lives are stamped now.....everything occurred before or since.). I could have easily been a hoarder, one of those souls on cable channels buried within the piles of her possessions. I kept every piece of clothing my child or I had ever owned, every scrap of paper, video....and then one day it was all piled in the yard in front of what used to be my house.

Don't get me wrong, I am far from minimilist but I have much less stuff than I used to, and I had already lost every possession once. What was it God wanted me to learn from this week?

I knew it immediately. I was in the bed, and it came to my me, and I wanted to ignore it. But I did what I always do when something important occurs: I text my husband. (One day I will tell you our love story. But believe me when I say that God, as always, gave me so much more than I could have ever imagined in that man.) I outlined the plan in a series of 7 texts, asked him to help me, hold me accountable, and then told him what it was I felt the Lord was trying to teach me:

{Oh, please don't tell my father this. Don't call him; don't email; don't facebook....please, please do not let him know how right he was the past 30 + years.}

 If you want your stuff to take care of you, you have to learn to take care of your stuff.

I have always been a someone else will clean-it-up-fix-it-make-it-right kind of girl. I hate it, but I was am. Someone else always cleaned, repaired, "upkept" all of my stuff. Until this week.......I am a wife. I am a mother. I am a grown-up. I need to take much better care of the stuff I have, treat it like I am proud of it, want to keep it, and want it to do whatever its intended function is.

I think I wish the Lord would have asked me just to get rid of a few hundred items than confront this truth.
But he didn't, and it is now out there. If you see me, ask me if I am taking care of what I have been blessed to have. Remind me that all things take effort to maintain and that I am capable and should maintain a lot of my stuff (car, home, clothes) myself.

I am thanking you in advance!