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Toasters, Faith and Remembering
This post was originally posted in June of 2019 as Thanksgiving nears in 2020 I thought it may do us all well to reflect and remember. It has been quite the year since this post first circulated. Yet even with all of the upheaval and strangeness that 2020 has brought our way-when we pause to remember we see that God is still good! A toaster was all it took to throw me into a crisis of faith yesterday. I love toast as much as the next person, but it wasn’t the actual toaster that triggered my downward spiral, but what the toaster represented. About a year ago, my family took…
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Vanity of Vanities
A sixty-two-year-old man went to the ER. Doctors found a large mass pushing his stomach down between his hips. They removed the twelve-pound mass. It was not a tumor. The man had swallowed $650 worth of coins. He had a psychiatric condition called pica in which a person eats inanimate objects. Are you a glutton for possessions? I did a recent closet inventory to prove I don’t hoard. Purses: twenty-nine; earrings: sixty pair; shoes: fifty-two pair. I see shopping as a boring, time-sucking inconvenience. So why do I have so much stuff? …
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Are You a Spiritual Hoarder? Three Ways We Withhold Ourselves—and Our Stuff—from Others
Hoarder: “A word that describes anyone that feels the need to find, collect, keep, [or] pack any and everything because they do not know how to throw things away” (Urban Dictionary). Several years ago there was an entire TV series about hoarders. There are entire companies devoted to helping hoarders clean up. And there are even medical disorders related to hoarding. Innate within each of us—to varying degrees—is a desire to hold on to something. Hoarding is more than just stowing away our stuff in some dark closet. Sometimes it means we keep our deepest selves locked tightly within us. Here are three ways we withhold ourselves from others and…
