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.”
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