It's been a while since I ran this post, but it came to mind again this week. It seemed appropriate both for Valentine's Day and the circumstances we may find ourselves in these times.
I’ve been
crawling around in one of the attics this week. We have three. Thankfully, one
of them is empty.
For those of you
who have spotless attics swept clean with boxes carefully labeled, you’ll want
to skip this post. It’s not for you.
But if open
cardboard boxes, overflowing TJMaxx bags, and loose debris tumble overhead in
your home, you’ll understand.
How’d so much stuff
get up there?
Try home
schooling for eight years. So far, I’ve counted five bins of schoolbooks.
There’s probably more, because I’m only a third of the way through this attic.
Add to that the kid’s art projects I couldn’t let go. It’s just always been
easier to poke stuff I didn’t know what to do with in the attic and deal with
it later. Later has arrived. Can you say procrastinate?
Through the years,
it was a no brainer to carry odds and ends to Goodwill--clothing and linens to
a ministry for the homeless, but what about that box of costumes my kids wore a
thousand days, so tattered no one else would want them? I can still see my son
in the cowboy chaps and my daughter in the yellow tutu.
I know, I know.
Our memories are not tied up in our things. But, right now, this Mama with the
starkly empty nest can’t take some of this to the dump.
Still, after many
hours yesterday, I almost filled up the recycle bin, added to our load for the
landfill, and crated several boxes to carry off to various places.
I have much work
ahead squinting and poking around in the darkness, while trying to avoid roofing
nails overhead (sad to report no overhead insulation in this old house).
Some of the blasts
from the past brought me to tears.
A message from a long
ago Valentines Day, a project
from Sunday School—
“I will give you the treasures of darkness
And hidden wealth of secret places,
So that you may know that it is I,
The Lord, the God of Israel, who calls
you by your name”(Isaiah 45:3 NASB).
Way up there in
the darkness, in the midst of a hard project, God called to me through treasured
messages of grace and love from kids long grown into young adulthood.
Makes me think of
another dark time just after I’d had breast cancer surgery when I battled fear one
night until the early hours of morning. The thought, “You’re going to die,”
hounded me. Then, just before dawn, God’s love and peace overwhelmed me—a
treasure in the darkness.
“I’m absolutely
convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or
tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get
between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced
us” (Romans 8:38-39).
From my own experience,
I know cancer and dark attics can’t get between God’s love and us either.
Praying His
treasures for you in your own dark times, friends.
