Love of 'Stuff'

When I was in high school I helped my elderly grandparents at times, either cooking or cleaning for them. They had an old house with a partially finished upstairs which held a sort of makeshift spare bedroom, some of grandma’s sewing projects and a very large two door cabinet. One day I opened the cabinet to find it stuffed to the gills with laundry detergent -approximately 35 boxes of detergent!!

Grandma and Grandpa had been through some horrendous things in their lives. The stuff that movies are made of was buried in their past, but its affects were staring me in the face when I opened the cabinet. War, poverty, death….all of these had left an imprint on Grandmas heart but hadn’t hardened her. She never let on that she had deep hurts and fears over the things that had happened, but when I opened the upstairs cabinet that day I realized the immense fear that must have been inside of her for all those years.

The day came when I looked around my own home and garage and saw that I had taken a bit of comfort in the ‘stuff’ I’d accumulated. Most of this stuff wasn’t necessary for life, but it absorbed my time, money and attention. Maintaining and protecting material stuff also put a drain on my energies and frustrated me at times.

I don’t know the exact day I lost affection for my stuff – it didn’t happen overnight. I do know that my lost affections for more and more, and bigger and better, paralleled the healing of past hurts that took place in my heart and emotions. That’s when fear lifted and material things brought no comfort. That’s when pain from the past and the comfort of material things was washed away by the love of God.

Jesus had no place to lay his head - He attached to no physical place or thing on this earth and allowed nothing but God and His purposes to grasp His heart and affections (Luke 9:58). That is not to say that we have to live in a cave without comfort. It’s an opportunity to question our accumulation of ‘stuff’ and see where it might be filling a void or comforting a hurt that God wants to heal.

Perhaps it’s time to ask yourself, “What’s in that upstairs cabinet?”