A Daughter of the King Declutters - Dreaming Beneath the Spires

A Daughter of the King Declutters

My friend Paul Millerwho teaches and writes on love and prayer has this advice for settling in to times of prayer.

Ask, “So, how am I? Am I sad or happy? Anxious? What is the state of my soul? The state of our union? From these answers flows a quiet time which is intimately connected to who and what you really are and what you really care about.” (Sorry missionaries, Aunt Joyce, and my friend’s mother-in-law who’s having surgery, I am afraid you won’t figure!)

So what is the state of my soul, and what am I thinking of today? Well, as I’ve probably blogged about, we finally broke down and decided we needed more help than a cleaner. So we have a young Pole come a couple of times a week, clean, and do various housekeeping chore–he assembled bookshelves today.

And since, I can’t write particularly well with people around, that is my one day to declutter. Which feels SO good.

Getting rid of things, and having a sparse household is liked to one’s faith in God. I think of a lovely story Jack Miller (father of the Paul I’ve just mentioned) tells. He and his wife Rosemarie founded World Harvest Mission and were visiting Uganda. They come late to a post meeting, and every seat is taken except the ones right in front, next to the President, Idi Amin. Rose Marie nervously tells Jack, “I’ll sit on the grass.” “Jack says, “Rose Marie, no! You are wearing a lovely dress. You are a daughter of the King. Be brave. We will sit in front.” And they go and sit next to Idi Amin, who is gracious to them.

I can’t tell you how often I have said that to myself–when nervous, when beyond my depth, when dealing with rude, overbearing or condescending people, when travelling, when insecure. “Anita, you are a daughter of the King.”

And when decluttering.

Because there are two principles at work in decluttering. As Thoreau rightly observes, the true cost of everything is “the life” which goes into earning and replacing it. If I tidy a closet by taking its entire contents to the Charity shop (a solution I’ve contemplated, believe me!) the cost of that will be the time it takes me (or more likely, my long-suffering husband, Roy) to earn the money to replace these things.

Conversely, I am a daughter of the King. I do not need to have clothes which are worn, or ill-fitting or ugly. I do not need to have things which are grotty, ugly, or chipped or broken waiting to be mended in my house. I can throw away lonely things and throw away the missing parts when they surface.

I have recently been setting aside a day a week to relax and sort through closets and dressers and undersink cabinets. Goodness, the undersink cabinet in our bedroom has had things stuffed in for 4.5 years. It must have been magically expandable. And given that I had only the haziest notion of what I stuffed there, I obviously didn’t need it. Of course, I had some ecstatic reunions with long-long things, but by and large, a lot of it was just tossed into the rubbish, or into the charity donation box.

(Incidentally, one of the best ideas I’ve come across in Oxford are the swap shops. There are several of them every month. We took 4 boxes of stuff to last weeks’, and Irene came back with 1 thing. So we are significantly lighter.)

And why, why, why am I decluttering? Actually, a wise person we sought spiritual advice from a few months ago suggested it. Let’s start establishing the Kingdom of God in your physical surroundings, he said. Which I am doing. An undersink cabinet this week, a dresser and a closet last week, two dressers the week before. (I have obviously accumulated a lot of clothes I never use!)

And order feels so good. For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. 1 Cor 14:33. I have never known how to combine writing and housekeeping. Because the thought of having to do even a little housework so depresses me that I do neither
the writing nor the housekeeping, So carving out one day a week to just keep up with the house, even in a hazy, dazy state, seems to be working. And hopefully, within a year or so, I will get it all done.

I am a bit cross with myself for having accumulated so much stuff. I had a large house, very large, when I lived in America. We spent 9 years in our last house which had a large attic and garage. So we basically stuffed things there to be dealt with later, which never came. Our bedroom was a suite, with a room-sized walk-in closet, a room sized dressing room, and an attached bath. Our house was in the modern American style–a formal living room, and a family room, a formal dining area, and a family dining area. Stuff, stuff everywhere.

When we visited England and decided to stay, I did not even go to America to move us. Since the university was paying, we paid movers to pack up our house, lock, stock and barrel, and move it here. Which they did. Unread magazines, trashcans with trash in them, pantries with out of date food, garden compost bins, hoses–no kidding! It was the biggest van the movers had ever seen–and five years later, I am still dealing with it.

But for the last time ever. My grandparents were pack-rats. When my aunt died, my parents inherited a house in which two bachelor brothers, a spinster sister, and their parents had a lifetime of stuff, nothing ever thrown out. The strain of sorting and donating all that literally killed my father who had been superlatively fit before those killing months.

I intend to die with a relatively spare, relatively minimalistic house so that no one else will have to waste their life sorting out what I was too lazy to!

Inside/outside, body/spirit, house/spirit, it’s really all of a piece, isn’t it?

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