Decluttering

Remember by Sarah Lomas

My old desk is going to a new home, and so I've been emptying all its drawers. It's been a fascinating exercise.

The contents have included my collection of postcards going back to my childhood and the diary of the year I proposed to Jane one July evening - on 8th August it simply says, "YES!!". There was the letter from my headteacher when I changed from teaching to ordination training - very complimentary about my contribution to the school and the community. There was the first page of a sermon I preached in a series where we made the script available. (I don't usually preach from a script.) It was, I thought as I read it with fresh eyes, rather promising, comparing the Bible to the letters I'd kept from Jane until we were married. The Bible, I said, was God's love letters to us, full of everyday life and gritty reality, with the occasional expressions of his passionate love. The analogy broke down, I said, in that I no longer need to read Jane's letters because we live together, but our divine marriage isn't yet consummated and so we need to read God's letters until we see him face to face. Sadly there was no page two of the sermon and so I don't know how I applied it. I hope I said something about the Holy Spirit helping us understand it. But having read it, I did think, "Maybe the congregation did get some sense out of me after all."

It encouraged me. I guess it's in my nature to question what I've done, to recall my failures and to view others as achieving so much more. So to see how the parish did develop (via notices and agendas and bits and pieces) over nearly twenty years was healthy. Most healing of all was to read letters and cards of appreciation from individuals saying how much I'd helped them. Interestingly a number were from after I was diagnosed with MND. I'd forgotten that.

I could just have dumped the entire desk contents in the wheelie bin - well, asked someone else to! - but I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad I went through it drawer by drawer. I suppose it could have been a melancholy way to spend a day and a half; but in fact it made me continually grateful. God has been good to me. I am now going to jettison most of what was in the desk. But I'm keeping a few things to remind myself, in case I need to, of God's faithfulness.

Remembering is a repeated theme in the Bible. When the people of Israel come across the Jordan into the promised land, they build a monument of twelve rocks. Joshua tells them, "When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’  then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial for ever.” And of course today Communion is a weekly act of remembering the ultimate declaration of God's love for us. We do this in remembrance of Him - until He comes!