Decluttering, Again

It’s the Third Week of Lent, and we have not made much progress on our goal to PURGE, PURGE, PURGE. We have so much STUFF! We’ve been here two years, and I can’t really make the excuse anymore that we’ve been moving, this is our 9th home in 18+ years of marriage, it’s hard to organize and reorganize when you move every few years, we have a baby (hah! Our youngest one is 6!!!), we are too busy (true, but not the whole truth)… Enough of the (lame) excuses. I have to own it and own it now. I am attached to my “stuff”. And as Colleen says, it keeps me from following God completely. In my brain, I have this image of a really pared down room, with only a few nice things to give it character and personality, to celebrate beauty without placing it before the God of Beauty. I don’t have this room. I’ve had this image in my brain for YEARS, and I have yet to make it happen. I have talked and talked to my family about how we should attempt to move closer to something akin to monastic life, that we need to travel the road to asceticism — but not to extremes…. but if you could see my bedroom right now, you would know it’s been all talk. We have purged, but we haven’t purged enough. We’ve been working on this holiness thing, but our home isn’t quite a reflection of that .

Besides this, I have to own that “I cannot teach what I do not know.” Yes, yes, we homeschoolers are famous ( ) for being resourceful and we can find ways to get our kids to learn chemistry when we don’t remember how to balance equations, etc. But this is different. It’s all about MY bad habits that I have not corrected and replaced with good ones. I’m 40. I’d hate to look back when I’m 50 and realize I’ve wasted 10 more years on STUFF. There is no way to give to God the time I owe Him when I’m busy giving that time to my STUFF. (That may include blogging by the way ). And there is no way I can teach my children to put God first ALWAYS when I’m not doing that myself. I can’t ask them to limit their toys to 10, when I have 40 cookbooks in ONE bookcase. I can’t tell them to avoid forming too many worldly attachments, when it’s obvious I can do with a lot less.

It’s going back again to WANT vs. NEED. A subject of discussion periodically tackled by dh and me. Heh. Maybe if instead of talking it out and going around in circles, and telling each other what we could do and what we should do, we had just gone to the basement and boxed up stuff, we’d be done now.

I could say more, but I really must just link to the post that inspired this post: Colleen’s over at Footprints on the Fridge. I hope you are inspired in turn.

I will plug one organization that helps us get rid of our stuff without difficulty: Freecycle.org. Find your local Freecycle group, post what you want to get rid off, leave it on your driveway or your porch, and someone comes to pick it up. Sometimes there are people that don’t come when they said they would, but the percentage in our experience has been small.

Speaking of habits…. one thing that is REALLY helping us this Lent: Instead of each one of us reading the Bible individually, in our own time, we now gather at the breakfast table with our individual Bibles and read, quietly. At some point I think I’ll have us share something that we’ve read and the message we received today. On Sundays we will also start doing this with Dad, before Mass. This will also help prepare our hearts for receiving Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

So lose some bad habits, gain a few good ones…. we’ll keep trying….

Tonight was the Blue and Gold Banquet. Our Paco graduated from Cub Scout to Boy Scout. Their den leader made a little speech about each boy and my throat was aching with unshed tears, and that was just the first boy. She got to Paco and I was starting to tear up, esp. when she talked about Paco always giving 110%. Then she got to her own son and said “I love you” in addition to the “I believe in you and I’m proud of you” which every boy received, and it was all I could do to keep from bawling. Sniff. These boys are getting big!!! Where has the time gone?