November 2007

Are You a Slave to Your Crap?

            For the past week, my living room has been full of crap.  It has lurked in the corners, clomped around the furniture, stacked itself up in tumbling towers of nothingness, and wobbled to and fro across the room underneath my feet.   My roommate has been very patient. 

Several years ago when my life was characterized by the phrase, “topsy-turvy”, I stored some of my more breakable belongings at the house of a relative.  Now, years later, I am more settled into a home I love and ready to have all of my belongings in one place.  Not to mention the fact they all needed to be sorted through between what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to get rid of.  So last week, one box after another waltzed their way up the stairs, (not an easy feat considering I live on the third floor).  Dancing in they settled themselves all over the floor and became quite comfortable.  There was my old computer now ten years old, (anyone know where I can recycle that?), old year books, a peach bathrobe, a peach blanket, (I went through a peach phase as a teenager), an original Nintendo, (my roommate got very excited about that one), even the length of hair that was cut off when I went from long to short hair after college.  (I still look near a decade younger than I am.)  There was lots of memorabilia too from growing up such as journals I never kept, a music box I don’t remember, drawings I did in high school, and gads and gads of photos.  There were also more precious items such as a mantle clock I was given for my 18^th birthday and my Grama’s China originally made in Poland.  That last one is the one I treasure. 

Now typically, I am a person who likes things neat, clean, and uncluttered.  If you were to see my bedroom, you would usually gaze upon a made bed, straight rugs, and everything put away and in its place.  Usually.  The living room, however, was another story and driving me nuts.  So throughout last weekend and into the first half of this week, you could often find me in the middle of the living room floor sorting through years of accumulated crap.  My roommate, who enjoyed this spectacle immensely, was perched on the couch as I showed her various items from my past.  Her repeated line as I drilled her to say was, “Sarah, you don’t need it!  Get rid of it!”   Though not always successful, she did alright at it.  (With a little prompting.) 

My favorite moment in the midst of this mess was when we were going through some photos from college.  Katie, my roommate, and I, went to the same university, had the same major, were even involved in the same Christian group with her graduating two years later than I.  Though she claims my face looked familiar when we first met, we never knew each other in college.  We never spoke and if we did, neither of us remembers.  So we’re going through photos and I’m handing many of them to Katie to see as we knew many of the same people.  Suddenly, she screams out, “That’s me!” and startled, I look up to see her staring absolutely stunned at one of the photos.  Now, you may think this would not be entirely surprising since we ran in the same circles but this wasn’t a photo of my friends.  For some random, long forgotten reason, I took a picture inside the dining hall where I usually ate my meals.  It may have simply been to remember the place or it may have been some special Sunday as you can tell they were serving brunch.  I don’t know.  But there was Katie in her dining hall worker’s uniform making omelets.  And I realize now, she had probably made me one that day.  She has never done that since we’ve been roommates.  I think she’s holding out on me.  But we sat there, floored on our floor.  She said it was the only time she had ever done that job and it happened to be the day I took the picture.  The providence of God still blows me away.

As fun as that particular episode was, going through all those pictures was painful in many ways.  Seeing the old year books, reading my journals from my early teens, remembering who I have been, and who I am now, was hard.  I had this image of myself, who I was in that time in my life and frankly, I didn’t think very much of her.  I thought she was dorky, depressed, and obsessive over relationships (not boyfriends) that I should not have in the least bit been concerned about.  Going through all those things was like opening an old wound I have managed to squelch to some degree for some time.  But I felt like that young teenager all over again, dorky and depressed.   Then I found my yearbooks and the comments in them described someone very different from who I remembered being.  There was my best friend’s handwriting across the years telling me how much she loved me and how we would be friends forever, people telling me I was one of the most genuinely kind people they knew, that I had changed their lives, and to please, keep writing.  They described a person I truly pray I was and one I hope I am now.  It made me question the image I had of myself. 

The next morning, I was driving up to Vancouver to visit my sister and niece.  All the piles of crap in my living room were still on my mind and this 14 year old self was sitting there in front of me just looking at me as I looked back at her.  I felt God pull up a stool beside us and after a period of silence, ask what I wanted to say to her.  I told her I thought she was dorky, that I didn’t like her, and it was hard for me to see her.  I told her I was ashamed of what she did, how she behaved, and what she looked like.  She just sat there and took it.  God didn’t.  He reminded me of the journals I had stayed up late to read the night before.  At the end of almost every entry was something along the lines of “I love you God and I trust you. Help me trust you more.”  God looked at me and he said, “I taught her that and she learned it well.  Listen to her.”  He then asked my 14 year old self if there was anything she wanted to say to me.  At first, I had a hard time hearing it, I didn’t want to hear it, but what I heard surprised me.  She said she was proud of who I had become, that I was the kind of person she had always wanted to be.  But her voice was not filled with self-loathing or idol worship of her twenty-seven year old future self.  Her voice was strong, clear, and wise.  I wondered at it and she replied this was her true self, her healed-true-self.  That hard shell of awkward teenager hood and been taken away and I found I liked who was inside.  That girl told me she had been perfectly normal, going through all the things girls that age experience, that there wasn’t anything so bad or unusual about her, she was just like everybody else.  Those times were simply the normal rites of passage and if she made decisions or looked different than I would have had her look, (Katie says she was cute), she was still making the best decisions she could for herself given the circumstances.  She also told me she had done something right if she had grown into the woman I was now and that I had been a great person.

Then, my fourteen year old self, took out from behind her our year and a half year old self.   Now, I am well-acquainted with this little girl because my sister transferred a bunch of early home videos onto a DVD for her and I.  When I first saw it, it was like seeing my pure true self as I have always been.  My mom wrote in my baby book, “You are such a character!” and you can clearly see that in these videos.  One friend who saw it said, “That is pure joy!”  I was laughing, running, smiling, getting into trouble and getting caught.  I was having fun.  I love that little girl.  And there she was, standing before me with God’s laughter in her eyes.  My fourteen year old self looked at me and said she had closed up to protect this little girl but like a flower in full bloom, I needed to live her out and hold her up to the light.  To once again, be who God had always known I was, to once again rejoin her and come together.  While God played with this small but powerful little self beside us, my 14 year old self told me it was time to let her go, to let her die in my heart, to accept what was and to go on and live my life.   To stop holding on to her and her crap, both physical and emotional.  After saying our goodbyes, God gave me my young self and told me to learn from her, let her guide me.  He then took my fourteen year old self and they walked off into the darkness which I suspect was the light I could not see.  Holding onto the hand of the little girl I was, I then drove the rest of the way toward my sister’s house and toward my niece who is now one and a half years old.

This very mystical experience has stayed with me throughout this last week as I finished sorting things through and getting rid of what I no longer needed to hold on to.  It felt pretty good.  The peach robe and blanket are gone.  I gave them to a rummage sale.  The photos are all together in boxes and the china is waiting to be used in the free life I am living.  We kept the Nintendo.  And perhaps someday, I will go through it all again, and get rid of even more.   Each time I do, I am less attached to keeping those things that are stored away anyway.  It’s a continual lesson of what to keep and what to give over to God.  I no longer need to carry the weight of who I have been.  I no longer need to carry all that crap.