If you ever wonder where God is on your list of priorities, do what I did: Take
inventory of all the stuff you should have thrown out over the years but couldn't (due to
the theory that someday you might find an important use for it). Here's a tiny portion of
my list.
Boxes. A third of my attic is devoted to them. Plus a fifth of my office and a seventh
of my bedroom closet. I save mostly odd sizes, because I never know when I might need to
mail something oddly shaped, such as a tire iron.
Plastic potato salad containers. They've been mating with the Tupperware in a dark
kitchen cabinet. The result is miniature fruit bowls bursting through the cabinet door.
Amputated electrical cords. I believe in the hoarder's golden rule: "Thou shalt
not throw out the whole thing just because part of it has gone bad." When my
daughter's alarm clock slipped a disc, surgery revealed that the plastic innards were
beyond repair, so we gently placed the dead clock on the counter where we mourned it. It
remained there for days because we couldn't bear to toss out something we had purchased
less than a year earlier.
When I finally did hold the clock over the garbage can, bidding it a final farewell and
uttering an angry word about shoddy workmanship, I looked at the perfectly good cord
dangling from its backside.
I smiled. I knew that someday my husband would want to attach a cord to some
resurrected household appliance, and he would complain, "Oh, if only we had saved a
perfectly good cord from the backside of some dead electrical device." There's just
one minor problem. The drawer is already too stuffed with amputated cords to fit one more
in inside.
I also collect sock singles. After the laundry machine has sucked a sock into its Hole
of No Return, I keep the remaining sock as a kind of homing device. I'm hoping the sock
that strayed will begin to miss its mate and pick up its scent to follow it back home to
its drawer.
This has yet to work.
I don't suppose God intended for me to be this way. It probably indicates I give too
much attention to material possessions. Although I'm sure God wants us to enjoy our
material goods, any possession that is more important than God to me would do me more good
in the laundry machine's Hole of No Return. When God takes second place, I'm succumbing to
idolatry.
A test of where my priorities are is to ask myself, "Which of my possessions would
I not want to part with if a needy person asked for it?"
"Sock singles" would probably be my answer. After all, if the needy person
would be willing to wait until the missing socks returned home, I could give away a
matched set. Once I start handing out halves of sets, what would I do when the lost ones
come searching for their mates? I'd be right back where I started with a drawer full of
sock singles.
Never mind that God's still, small voice within my head would be saying, "Buy a
new pair."
Sure, God. And when one of those gets lost? Then what!
