“Stop collecting treasures for your own benefit on earth, where moth and rust eat them and where thieves break in and steal them. Instead, collect treasures for yourselves in heaven, where moth and rust don’t eat them and where thieves don’t break in and steal them. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Everything should be done with dignity and in proper order.

Matthew 6:19-21, 1 corinthians 14:40

Right now our home (Maul-Hall Wake Forest) is such a complete mess I am not even going to try to capture it in a photo. I mentioned this before as a humorous aside, but now I am convinced: “We made a deliberate decision to downsize our home when we moved to North Carolina. What were we thinking!”

Seriously. Rebekah has spent four decades of ministry collecting books, resources, files, and memorabilia. She enjoyed the privilege of occupying beautiful, spacious offices in three churches. Now we’re in the process of bringing all that into an 1800 square foot three bedroom home that was already feeling tight.

The “solution” – which I will proudly photograph when we finally get this done – is to convert the dining room into Rebekah’s at home study. In order to facilitate this we are packing up china we never use, putting dining room paraphernalia into the kitchen, giving away two-thirds of Rebekah’s books, getting rid of furniture, and moving three bookcases down from my office.

In turn, while boxes are coming home from the church, I am completely reconfiguring my space, getting rid of half my books, and paring down forty years of my memorabilia.

One thing moves… three other things have to shift to accommodated it. This is an absolute mess. However – and I will share the final result in time – it is all going to be good in the end.

For my part, I deliberately started the sorting this week because the deadline of “grandchildren sleeping in my office” will arrive Friday. In consequence, I have forced myself into a position where I literally must get this done!

Along the way, this is a process of discovery and I seem to be spending just as much time reading stuff as I am sorting it out!

My treasure, my heart:

Jesus was absolutely right when he talked about the problem with, “storing up treasures.” In Mark’s Gospel he goes on to ask this simple question: “Why would people gain the whole world but lose their lives? What will people give in exchange for their lives” (Mark 8:36-37)?

We have so much, and we have so much to be thankful for – DEREK