About a week ago, on Saturday morning, I woke up, dressed, and walked outside into the grey light
of day. I intended to spend the day doing some deep cleaning in my old
apartment, and hoped to make progress with deciding where to store my belongings.
While I was walking toward the bus stop, I noticed a bitter, burning smell in
the air. As I approached the intersection, I saw firefighters and police
officers using their vehicles to block off the street, cautiously dismantling a
burnt vehicle as they stood on scraps of charred metal. Because it would have
been impossible for the bus to pick me up from that stop, I decided to start
walking. To walk from my house to my old apartment would take over an hour, but
there was nothing else to be done.
I pounded down the sidewalk
with my arms crossed over me, trying to keep out the surprisingly cold wind. As
I walked, I reflected on my lack of motivation. Why should I have to spend my
Saturday cleaning a home that was no longer mine? Why should I have to pack and
divide my belongings, to store them at cost until I could find another
opportunity to live in the way I desired? As I walked, I grew angrier and more
frustrated, feeling nothing but the injustice of my situation, feeling trapped in
a whirlwind of circumstance.
I realized, suddenly, that
I could not say, with Kathleen Norris, that the thing happening to me was the
thing I desired. This was a sobering realization. I remembered her advice about
how to adopt an attitude, how to inhale a spirit, of detachment. There was only
one method: prayer. So, as I walked down long grey sidewalks, wondering how
long until I made it home, I prayed. Because God had already begun the work of
detachment in my heart, I felt able to pray for this. I prayed that God would
enable me to choose rightly, that he would show me whether I should keep my belongings,
and that he would help my heart to release all the things I wanted to keep.
As I prayed, I noticed a
few things. First, I didn’t feel angry or burdened anymore. Second, this
release of distress came with the decision to give away and/or sell my
belongings to the girl I replaced in my new house, because she is swapping
lives with me, and moving into her very first apartment, which she will share
with one other person. The deep surprise of this moment, I think, was the
absence of pain. I felt certain that this is what I wanted to do, not just what
I ought to do, and I felt free from the burdens of my own emotions. Finally,
after about 40 minutes of walking, the bus came. I reached the apartment, did
some cleaning, and when my old roommate returned, I told her what I had
decided. The girl who is taking my things came over that afternoon and
together, we walked around the apartment as she evaluated what she could use. Instead
of feeling like a mother selling her children in a market stall, I found it
easy to extol the merits of my sofa, the comfortable, attractive, brown-suede couch that I had cried over purchasing
a year ago, because furniture is so adult and I’m afraid of money.
I think I’m keeping my
kitchen supplies: dishes, pots, and pans, because I can store them in the
garages of a few family friends and they will keep until I need them, if I need
them, again. But we will see about that, I suppose, because the goal is to “be
free from wanting certain things to happen.” It is amazing how many things I no
longer own.
God never forces us to do
anything we don’t want to do. Why? Because He loves our yes.
“Turn my eyes from looking at
worthless things, and give me life in your ways.”
