Stuff
I say, “stuff” a lot. The Bible study talks about how stuff in the Bible relates to stuff today. The sacristy is full of liturgical stuff. I am currently boxing up all kinds of stuff in my office. And, of course, there's the ever present stuff at coffee hour (which, by the way, someone suggested that all future priests at St. Luke's be informed that “stuff” was to be part of the formal dismissal).
In last week's sermon, I touched a little on the stuff in our lives. In the Letter to the Hebrews we are admonished to share what we have. “How much stuff do we have?” I asked. “How much is too much?” And I gave a couple of examples of how we could share some of the abundance of stuff we have with others.
Last week I got a phone call from a woman needing help paying for two nights at a motel. After informing her that that is not something I do, and her trying to negotiate me down to a single night, we came to an agreement that I would take her to a grocery store and help purchase a few groceries.
To make a very long story short, we weren't able to connect. But she called me this week telling me that she needed to move from the motel where she was currently staying to another motel where, she assured me, someone from another church was willing to pay for her room. I agreed to pick her up and take her to the new motel.
When I arrived at her room, I was absolutely astounded at sheer volume of stuff she had. There was so much stuff that I was unable to comprehend how this small woman moved from place to place. She had three large boxes weighing well over 50 pounds each. She had six or seven smaller boxes. She had five large garbage bags full of stuff. She had three knapsacks of clothes. She had two large cushions. She had a combined four plastic bags and one box of vegetables. She had another plastic bag filled with scraps of phone book pages, pens, paper, and whatnot that she referred to as her purse. She had one walker and awheelchair.
Between myself, the motel manager, the unnamed person from the church who was supposedly paying for her next room, and the woman, we arrived at a very temporary and not very satisfactory solution to that day's problem. And it took me five trips with the car to deliver all of her stuff.
As I was preparing to leave, she was inventorying everything, making sure I hadn't left anything in the room or left any of her stuff in the car. She was very adamant that everything . . . EVERYTHING . . . was with her.
How much stuff do we really need? And of the stuff we do possess, does that stuff hold primacy in our lives?
Maybe it takes a homeless woman in a wheelchair to show me how easily my life can become ruled by stuff.
Amen.
We used to have an organist who was a hoarder. He drove an old station wagon full of "stuff" - four extra hubcaps for his car, old shoes, crumpled fast food bags and cups, sheet music, old newspapers and magazines and a lot of unrecognizable stuff...When he opened the car door, stuff would skitter our onto the street, and he would careful collect it, check that it was all there, and slide carefully into the driver's seat, placing this stuff on the seat beside him, where it would skitter out again when he got out of the car.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever read a story called "How Much Land Does a Man Need"? The answer, at the end of the story, was a space six feet by four. I guess the answer is the same about how much "stuff" we need - a change of underwear, a study pair of shoes, and a heavy jacket. Maybe a pocket full of change...
"I've got a change in my pocket going jing-a-ling-ling . . ."
ReplyDeleteThanks for the earworm!
And I have spurs that jingle-jangle-jingle...You're welcome!
DeleteI started off thinking how foolish it is for this woman to have so much stuff to carry with no place to put it down. Then I looked around me and thought about what it would be like if I had no "place" and had to choose the essential stuff of my life. What am I willing to carry with me? This story has stirred up so many questions about my own stuff, both real and imagined.
ReplyDelete