The other night I was looking for something in my home office. He more I looked, the more files I went through. In fact, I found two boxes and one pile of “stuff to be filed someday.” My home office now looks as though it has been hit by a clutter bomb. I have files on taxes back to 1972. I have the paperwork for my current home, where I have lived for 25 years and the paper work for the two previous houses. And that is only the beginning.
I have decided that I need to takes several days off in the very near future and reduce all this clutter. Hopefully, I can actually do it in several days and not weeks. Which made me wonder about the other clutter in my life that I have accumulated over the years — things I have held on to, things which were once valuable but are now either worthless or meaningless.
I have every certificate I have ever received going back to elementary school. I have certificates from high school, college, the law enforcement world, the ministry, and a dozen other organizations that grant certificates or accolades. Most of them used to be in a frame on a wall. Now they are in a file folder. If I were famous, they could be in the library named after me. But I am not famous and there will be no library.
The clutter that I am more concerned about than the cutter in my home office is the clutter of life: the attitudes that I hold on too, the petty grievances and annoyances, the wrongs suffered that I may not have forgotten or forgiven. Then there are the excuses that I can always pull out of the files when something goes wrong or when I fail to do what is right.
Much of that clutter has been dealt with but the experience in the home office reminds me that clutter accumulates at a rapid pace almost without our being aware.
In one of the boxes, I found things that I thought I had thrown away, but there they were, taking up space. The clutter of life is like that too — just when you think you are doing fine, something is uncovered that reminds you that you did not deal with it after all.
Clutter, whatever the type, takes up valuable space in both the home office and in life. After all, we only have so much space to keep things and, if the worthless and the petty are allowed, then there is less room for the truly important and priceless.
So, I have work to do. There is just too much clutter that takes up too much space.
[David Epps is the pastor of Christ the King Church (www.ctkcec.org.). He is the bishop of the Diocese of the Mid-South, (www.midsouthdiocese.org) which consists of Georgia and Tennessee and is the associate endorser for his denomination’s military chaplains. He may be contacted at [email protected].]
