“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.

Matthew 6:19-21

So Friday I decided it was time to start the long overdue task of getting my mum and dad’s home in order. I started with their desks.

I really should have taken. “before” photographs. But if you can imagine drawers all stuffed with goodness knows what, the surfaces covered (to about 10 inches) with detritus, papers and boxes of papers under the desks, and then the space between their desks and the wall completely filled with debris that fell off the desks.

I kid you not – it was that bad and worse.

Plus dad had things like an adding machine, old telephones etc. that were literally not visible at the outset!

I plan to move around the house over the next few days, focusing on a different room each time. I think the simpler the home is, less cluttered and more accessible, the easier it will be for my mum to live there without running into confusion and trouble.

Downsize:

The more I think about it, the more “simplification” sounds good for me too! I love all the “things” in our home, but there is a fine line between “things we love” and “too much.”

Don’t worry, I’m not going all Marie Kondo here. But I have been asking some of my possessions “What have you done for me lately?”

It’s actually a long term process that started a few months before Rebekah and I came to Wake Forest in 2013. We knew we would be moving into a smaller house and downsized accordingly. Since then (other than moving Rebekah’s study into our home when she retired) we have continued to whittle away.

Where your treasure is…

The other challenge – probably the most important – is, “What do we really value?” Or, “How do we best utilize our resources?” Put another way, “How are we doing as stewards of the riches God has placed under our care?”

I know this is a long way from my original observations around clearing up my parents’ out of control living room! But I have found that nothing that happens in my life, nothing that I think about with any degree of spiritual clarity, is irrelevant to the deeper questions that are always active in my soul.

There is a question Rebekah and I often talk about. It became especially helpful the morning we woke up (living in Pensacola) and the news said, “Hurricane Opal is now Category 4 looking to strengthen to 5 and now expected to hit Pensacola directly!”

The question is, “If we had to leave our home immediately, in one car, what are the ‘must-haves’ we absolutely had to take?”

So we loaded up the children, the dog, the cat and – essentially – just a suitcase each. Opal then cooperated by jogging just slightly to the east and going back from a 4 to a 3. But we understood then that everything else was “just stuff.”

I am someone who loves his “creature comforts” and I get a lot of pleasure from my things. But there is a lot to be said for traveling light.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Jesus

So where is my treasure? Looking at retirement, where we’re going to be and what we’re going to be up to over the next couple of decades, the question of how to utilize the resources we are blessed with may be the most important ongoing conversation we can be having.

Meanwhile, there is still this huge mess to deal with next door – DEREK