I say that because this past Sunday afternoon I stood over my trash dumpster with palpitations, feeling clammy, and nauseous as my hands held tightly to something I didn’t realize meant so much to me. Something that I had decided, with much deliberation, had to go. Because I love you, I will allow you to laugh when you read why I was in such a state, chalk it up to religious persecution.
What I held in my hands so tightly resulting in such physical manifestations was a stack of scrapbook magazines.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and released them, and as expected, gravity snatched them right to the bottom of the dumpster.
I wasn’t sure if I would pass out or throw up!
As I walked away from the dumpster back into my house, I realized how much scrapbooking has meant to me over the past several years. I have enjoyed it very much and will still participate when I can, but life is changing….
“For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven…..
A time to plant and a time to harvest…..
A time to tear down and a time to build up….
A time to cry and a time to laugh
A time to grieve and a time to dance
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones
A time to embrace and a time to turn away
A time to search and a time to quit searching
A time to keep and a time to throw away."
Ecclesiastes 3
Now, I know you just read those verses without thinking about them since they are so familiar! I caught my husband doing just that as he proofread for me. Do yourself a favor and go back and read them again, soaking them in this time. They are words that were breathed by God onto the pages of His Word.
Yesterday, I wrote to you about our willingness and unwillingness to pay an asking price and I have come to a place where I have decided that something is worth the asking price.
That something is serving Him, serving you, through writing.
I have decided to sacrifice the little nitch in my laundry room I had previously claimed in my home as my “scrapbook space”, to set up a place of quiet where I can peck away at these keys for Him and for you without interruption or distraction. I have spent quite a bit of time over the past few days contemplating how I can make all of this work out and if I really wanted to do it. I have rearranged items and gotten rid of many things in an attempt to store what is left of my scrapbook supplies and make space for a desk in my laundry room.
It’s a new season. For everything there is a season, is what King Solomon said. It’s a spiritual spring time and I am excited to see what grows in this soil.
As I tossed and moved and shuffled things, I thought about how I sometimes have to rearrange things in my life to make sure God is first and sometimes I have to get rid of some things that are no longer needed in a life that works to honor Him. A time to keep and a time to throw away. (verse 6) As my life has changed over the years, and as my walk has gotten closer to Him than it once was, there have been things in my life that the time came to throw away. I have never regretted any of those decisions. Never once have I thought “I wish I still had that” when I have given up something for Him. On the contrary though, there have been times I have thought “I wish I still had that” as I have seen my closeness with Him slip because things in my heart need to be rearranged.
Closeness with Him is always in season.
What season are you in today?
Royal Princess Daughter Of The King
This has brought me to tears. How true those verses are, and I know how painful throwing away those things for Him can be as well, what you said about rearranging the laundry room is similar to how I have felt over the past month or so in my heart, that God is rearranging my heart, clearing out this, or that, and putting things in the dumpster, in a lot of cases, literally, and in some cases, spiritually. I have been shown so much about myself, and where my real priorities are, I want to one day, have no second thought, no painful questioning "seriously Lord?", when He asks something of me, but to just respond with joyful obedience, because He means so much to me that I wouldnt ever dream of choosing any other way.
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