I just purchased a new house or, rather, a new mortgage. I tell my kids that I own 3% of this house and it's whatever 3% I'm in, so if you want to be in the house that we own, you have to stay within the same 45 square feet that I'm in.
Packing and unpacking, as anyone who moves can tell you, is a real spiritual experience. You pick up hundreds of objects - from teaspoons to sofas, from toothbrushes to a ceramic spoonrest made by your son - and you have to ask yourself, each time you pick up an object, "Do I keep this? Do I give it away? Do I throw it away? Does this thing have a place in my life? Do I value it?"
More often than not a kind of ownership inertia sets in. "I've moved this object for the last four moves so I might as well move it again." But I tried this time to be really intentional about what I moved and why. A new house means a new opportunity to organize my life. It's both daunting and exhilarating.
As I was moving into my new abode (with many thanks to those people out there who helped me move) a scripture came to me over and over again in a way I'd never heard it before. In Revelation 21 as the nations enter the New Jerusalem, which has descended pristine and pure from the sky, the writer mentions that "nothing unclean will enter it." That it will always remain pristine and pure. And I want my new house to be like that. Oh, how I long for it to be like that.
But I already know, as much as I want to, it will not be so. There will be mud and there will be messes. There will be clutter and there will be chaos. In spite of my best intentions, my house will not be spotless. And, eventually, like the way of all flesh it will pass away, by cataclysm or natural decay. I was reminded of that too when I signed my insurance papers.
That said, I don't think it's a bad impulse to be mindful of what we bring into our houses. The things we keep, the stuff we store, say much about us. To paraphrase the recently deceased comedian, George Carlin, what is a house if it's not a place for our stuff? And the stuff we keep says as much about us as the stuff we leave behind.