Boxing Up Our Lives

I suppose you could say we are uncluttering our lives as we sort, discard, give-away, pack and store our “precious possessions”. Condensing it to what will fit into the back of a truck bed seems like a monumental task. At the same time it is freeing to pare our lives down to the “essentials”. I reserve the right to change my mind when we are in Mexico and feel the frustration of not having the needed convenience.

It’s amazing how quickly our hearts can be attached to “our” things even when they are virtually worthless. A few years ago I asked an Ecuadorian missionary if materialism was an issue in the jungles. His reply was that his son would go to the river and collect sticks and rocks. Eventually this collection could not be thrown out because they were “his” sticks and rocks. Insightful isn’t it? But it’s hard for me to stand in judgment since I literally have a collection of rocks myself that are “my” rocks.

John Piper challenges this attitude when he writes, “Very few…have said to themselves: we will live at a level of joyful, wartime simplicity and use the rest of what we can earn to alleviate misery…I do not see how we can read the New Testament, then look at two billion unevangelized people, and still build another barn for ourselves. We can only justify the exorbitance of our lifestyle by ignoring the lostness of the unreached and the misery of the poor…Is it the thrill of your life to live in such a sacrificial way that all can see that God is your treasure, not things?”