De-cluttering and repentance

Because de-cluttering requires inner change, repentance is involved, meaning the atonement of Christ must be activated. Repentance is the inner core of all de-cluttering efforts, and de-cluttering efforts are best and most lasting and even sanctifying when based upon faith in Christ.

You may ask me, “But what do I have to repent of when I de-clutter? Accumulating stuff isn’t a sin, is it?” I will tell you honestly that I don’t know whether accumulating stuff is a sin. But I can tell you that when a huge amount of stuff is accumulated, certain vices tend to be present, and those vices must be repented of for any lasting change to happen, vices such as:

• Covetousness
• Greed
• Distrust of the Lord’s power to provide
  
• Procrastination

These are ugly sounding words, sounding so blatant, but recognize that these vices never seem blatant when they are indulged in. They seem rational and pleasing to the carnal mind, and it is their consequences that seem most blatant when those consequences are accumulated over a period of time. These vices are in the little tiny decisions that happen over and over. Taken separately, they seem too small to pay attention to, but over time they will bring you to a place where suddenly you wake up and realize you have a terrible problem, the cause of which is not readily apparent.

You may be thinking right now that I'm really judgmental of you for writing that clutter arises out of greed and covetousness and all of that nasty sin stuff. You might think that I would look at your clutter and think you were a bad person and turn up my nose at you. No, I never do that. Rather, I have high hopes for you; the very fact that you are reading this demonstrates to you and to me that you have good desires and you want to overcome those vices, even when you didn't know they were vices! See? I know you're GOOD and want to be BETTER.

De-cluttering is part of the repentance process for these vices, and I think many people don’t realize that. People think of de-cluttering as the solution, but really, it's not. The atonement of Christ provides the solution, which is repentance. Repentance is the inner change so that you have no more desire to do evil, but to do good continually. But... inner change needs practice for it to be lasting, and de-cluttering is the practice that helps cement the inner change. It also helps reveal other hidden areas where repentance is needed.

The atonement of Christ doesn’t just help you rid yourself of vices, however. It also helps you develop new virtues. The de-cluttering process is the opportunity to discover the need for these new virtues and practice them. De-cluttering is a challenge and it requires spiritual gifts to do it, so it makes sense to pray as you de-clutter and ask for those spiritual gifts as you discover you need them, spiritual gifts such as:

• Discernment and judgment—De-cluttering requires you to develop the ability to make decisions in a new way that you haven’t before. It requires you to detect bad reasons for keeping things and cultivate stronger and better reasons for letting things go.
• Determination and fortitude—The more stuff you have to de-clutter, the more you need this spiritual gift.
• Vision—You need a vision of what your space could be like.
• Hope—You need hope that your vision can be made real if you persevere and that the result will be wonderful and help you more than you think it can.
• Faith—You need faith in yourself that you can do what it takes and faith in the Lord that He will help you and guide you.
• Charity—You need to have charity for others that you will give your surplus goods to, charity not just for your close associates that you can give directly to, but also to the nameless, faceless people who will be benefited by your surplus when you donate it to an organization.
• Prophecy—Sometimes you need to have a little bit of the gift of prophecy to be able to tell whether something really will be needed in the future. Just keep in mind, there is no element of fear in this prophecy, no element of doubt or temporizing. If you are keeping because of doubt or fear, then the faith required for prophecy is not present.
• Comfort and peace—For some people (not all), letting things go can bring unexplainable, strong feelings of loss and grief. This is when the spiritual gift of comfort and peace is most needed.

This list is not exhaustive. If you can think of other spiritual gifts involved, please comment. If I think of more, I will add to this post.

The atonement of Christ is at the very foundation of all lasting positive change in our lives, including de-cluttering. It makes perfect sense to put it to work in our lives as we work to conquer our clutter.

The 18 commandments of staying decluttered

I tried to make up a list of 10 commandments of staying de-cluttered, but there was too much to say. So, I give you The 18 Commandments of Staying De-cluttered!

1) Thou shalt find excuses to give away thy stuff.

2) Thou shalt carefully consider the poor, consider how thy unneeded stuff may enrich their lives.

3) Thou shalt limit thy supply of all that is not edible.

4) Thou shalt rein in thy sentiment before it reigns over thee.

5) Thou shalt get rid of (or donate) all that thou hatest, and have no respect to waste.

6) Thou shalt not keep more knick-knacks than thou hast room to display. (Ideally, thou shalt have no knick-knacks period, because they only accumulate dust and require special time and care for dusting.)

7) Thou shalt keep no gifts that thou dost not use, but give them away freely.

8) Thou shalt recycle thy boxes immediately.

9) Thou shalt immediately sort thy junk mail and recycle it.

10) Thou shalt immediately file thy important papers.

11) Thou shalt limit thy supply of plastic grocery bags.

12) Thou shalt keep possessions belonging to thy dearly departed relatives ONLY if thou dost use those possessions regularly. (Thou shalt not obligate thyself to finish thy dearly departed relatives’ craft projects.

13) Thou shalt not keep more pictures than thou canst display on walls or in albums. Thou shalt bless others with thy duplicate photos.

14) Thou shalt not keep more bedding or towels than thou canst use for the number of guest thou canst sleep in thy house.

15) Thou shalt speedily rid thyself of baby toys when past the age of childbearing, to bless the lives of new mothers.

16) Thou shalt send the belongings of thy grown children to them; thou shalt not keep them back.

17) Thou shalt rid thyself of kitchen appliances that thou dost not use.

18) Thou shalt throw away all broken possessions that thou hast been putting off repairing.

A post on false projects

On my other blog Scriptorium Blogorium, I just put up a post called "Projects like ravening wolves" in which I discuss how to tell if you have taken on a "false project," or a project that has little chance of benefiting you.

Check it out.

Why are you saving your old bill statements?

There are those of us who save our old monthly statements for all our bills that we have paid. We’re not sure why we do it, but we do it anyway. We have a vague feeling that somehow that information is important and that we may need it someday.

That fuzzy feeling of “I might need it someday” is your ENEMY. The vague feeling of discomfort and uncertainty needs to be confronted and banished, and the best way to do that is with hard facts about what information on the statement is useful and what is not.

I’ll tell you what I have found through experience about what info is useful and what is not.

I used to save all our bills that came in. When I finally got to the point that I and my husband were ready to make and live by a budget, those bills came in handy for determining average amounts that we should put in each of our bill categories each month. Because I had saved our bill statements, I had a history of bill charges that I could use to make a realistic budget. In fact, I went so far as to put all those charges for each month into a spreadsheet which added them all up and found the average for me. Once I put the amounts in the spreadsheet, I could shred my bills.

One other bit of information I put in a spreadsheet was usage information. For water, I put the amount of gallons we used. For electricity I put in the number of kilowatt hours we used. For telephone, I put the number of long-distance minutes we talked. This made it so that I could tell at a glance if there was anything strange in our patterns of usage. When we developed a bad water leak in the sprinkler system of the house that we were renting, I was alerted not just because the charges were higher, but because the water usage amount was three times higher than our usual water usage. (Disclosure: There was comparison information on my bill statement too about usage from a year ago, so I didn’t really get this info from my spreadsheet. But I could have.)

After I collected the dollar amounts and usage info from my bills, I shredded all our old bill statements. YES. I SHREDDED THEM! SHREDDED. Into little. Pieces. Of. Paper. I shredded them. (Insert triumphant cackle of laughter here) It was very satisfying to free all that space up in our files.

In short, the only reason a file full of old bills is important is if you are going to collect dollar amounts and usage amounts out of them for building a budget. But even if you DON’T record that info somewhere, ultimately, there will be no negative consequences to you if you decide to get rid of them anyway. The phone company will not break down your door and haul you off to a little chain-link fenced compound out in the desert if you get rid of your phone statements. Your power company will not charge you extra if it discovers you have discarded your old electrical bill statements. Believe me, it won’t. No consequences!

If you want to know, you only need to keep your most recent bill statement which has your account number information on it and any phone numbers you would call if you have a problem. And heck, if you were to record that information on a spreadsheet with the charges, you wouldn’t even need to keep that statement.

Oh wait, I forgot. Sometimes your city landfill will require you to show a most recent utility bill in order to drop off a load of stuff there, so maybe you should just keep ONE statement, if you take loads to the dump. But if you don't, don't bother.

Now.. if you are thinking about making a spreadsheet and putting years of your bill information on it, but you are intimidated by the size of that project, let me give you a tip. Doing a spreadsheet like this is pretty close to “being too organized” because it adds an extra layer to a work flow that disorganized people find onerous to begin with.

If you have troubles getting through this series of tasks, then don’t bother making a spreadsheet:

· Bring in the mail

· Sort out the bills and discard unneeded mail

· Put bills in a place that they will not be lost.

· Pay bills when they are due.

· File bills.

If you tend to put the bills someplace and then have troubles finding them so you can pay them on time, then making a spreadsheet for your bills is NOT something you should do. In fact, if you have troubles losing your bills, I am telling you now, THROW AWAY ALL YOUR OLD BILL STATEMENTS WHENEVER YOU FIND THEM. They only confuse you. Your concern should be making a consistent home for your unpaid bills so that you will always find them when you need to pay them.

The goal is to be organized enough that you pay your obligations. Anything after that is just extra credit points.

If you want something to sing while de-cluttering

If you want something to sing while de-cluttering, I've got the perfect thing. I wrote these lyrics myself to try to encapsulate some of the difficulties that are dealt with while trying to make decisions about what to discard and what to keep.

“Let It Go, Let It Go, Let It Go”

(sung to “Let it Snow, Let It Snow, Let, It Snow”)

Well the piles inside are frightful

Acquiring was so delightful

No place for the chi to flow

Let it go, let it go, let it go

I’ve squirreled away so much it’s scary

Now I want a home that’s airy

I’ll have to train myself to throw

Let it go, let it go, let it go.

Bridge:

When I’ve finally gotten rid

Of the things kept since I was a kid

There is plenty of open space

Room if I wanted to pace

Emotional attachment is clinging

But I’ve set myself to flinging

There’s someone who needs it mo’

Let it go, let it go, let it go.

My memory’s not eternal

So I wrote it in my journal

My keepsake pile is dropping low

Let it go, let it go, let it go

Bridge:

I’m afraid I have been obtuse

I thought someday this might find a use

Embarrassing, it appears

That was thought twenty-some years!

There’s stuff I’d thought I’d try repairing

There’s so much, I’m despairing

It’d stretch out in a mile-long row

Let it go, let it go, let it go.

I’ve finally stopped delaying

I’ll stand no more “some-day-ing”

Stop shifting stuff to and fro

Let it go, let it go, let it go.

Bridge:

There are projects I just might do

Talents in me I just might pursue.

Just because I give this away

Won’t mean I’m blocked from essay

These knickknacks sure were pretty

Before they broke and got dirty

There’s just too many to show

Let ‘em go, let ‘em go, let ‘em go.

Bridge:

When I toss a gift from a friend

I’m afraid that they’ll note and contend

But it’s not like it’s theirs, it’s mine

If they’re kind, they won’t malign

Well, the heirlooms that I inherit,

Unused, they lose their merit

Antiques they are, but even so

Let ‘em go, let ‘em go, let ‘em go.

Bridge:

When I come to what I collect

I must pause for a sec’ to reflect,

“Discarding it all’s a beast;

I’ll part with what I like least!”

We’ve finally cut the clutter

And put it out by the gutter

If it happens again I’ll know

Let it go, let it go, let it go!

Too organized?

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"The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for." Laura Ingalls Wilder

TOO organized? Is it even possible to be TOO organized?

Yes it is. In fact, sometimes people’s preconceived ideas about organization are as much of an obstacle to becoming organized as their disorganized habits are.

Being organized is NOT:

• Perfectly matching containers
• Labels printed in flawless lettering
• Day planned to the minute
• Floor clean enough for open-heart surgery
• Permanently without messes or piles
• Empty to-do lists (We wish!)

Being organized IS:

• Developing systems and personal habits that make it easier and faster to do what has to be done
• Developing systems that make it easy for you to find what you need among the things you have (and make it easy to direct others as to where to look if they have to find something for you).
• Having a place for your things with logical reasons as to why that place is the best place.
• Developing habits of maintaining the afore-mentioned systems

Part of becoming organized is that you learn to develop your own system to accomplish the goal you are aiming for. Staying organized is about using and maintaining the system you’ve developed as you go about your life getting things done.

In short, for everything you do as part of your system, there has to be a reason for it that benefits you and makes your life better in some way. Your system has to save you future pain and anguish for it to be a good system, otherwise it is just not worth it.

For example, your filing system has to make it easy for you to put papers away and find them again. If your filing system makes it hard for you to find your papers, then your system isn’t working and you need to figure out a new one that is better.

Organized people make just as much mess as anyone else, but they allow themselves time to clean up their mess on a frequent enough basis so that mess doesn’t become a permanent environment.

If a person becomes reluctant to do a project because of the mess that it will produce, there may be a problem; organization is being used as an excuse to avoid life, rather than engage in it.

Carrying a calendar and writing appointments in it is meant to help us keep our commitments. Keeping commitments helps you nurture important personal and professional relationships. Forgetting commitments damages relationships by destroying trust, and accumulating bad consequences can cause a lot of emotional pain.

But if calendaring is only used to schedule in things that you believe you should do but you’re not really committed to, then the calendar is being used as a tool to beat yourself up.  

Organizing tools are not meant to be used to guilt yourself into doing things; if they are used that way, they will fail. Organizing tools and systems are supposed to empower you to deal better with life the way it is and focus on living in a way that really matters to you.

The providence of God

For those of who have difficulty letting go of things on the grounds that you might need them someday, try trusting the providence of God. God sees you and knows what you need. Let go and trust that if the time ever comes that you need it again, God will provide you with what you need, whether with the funds to buy it, or with friends who let you borrow it.

As you let those things go, pray. Tell God all about it. Tell Him that you trust Him to provide for you. He won’t let you down.

Dealing with de-cluttering fear

I ran across the Blog “Be More with Less” with the post “Busting Your Biggest Clutter Fears” and thought I would give my take on some of the fears discussed and add a few tips of my own. So.. what are your biggest clutter fears?

I’m afraid I’ll have to buy it again

Are you one of those people who are reluctant to get rid of things you don’t use because you are afraid you’ll only have to buy it again later?

The best way to overcome this fear is to think about how many times you have used it so far, and then make a projection based upon how you live your life now how much you will have occasion to use it in the future. If you live life in the future very much like you live life today, what are the chances that you will use this object?

One of the mistakes we often make is to think that we HAVE to own and keep everything we use, even if we only used it once. A better way is to own and keep things that we have a very high probability of needing and using OFTEN.

Let me give you an example. I bought a crowbar a few months ago because I thought I was going to need to use it to change out some cement tiles on my roof. In the end, I didn’t really need to use it because a fellow from my church was kind enough to do the job for me. Yet I have been hanging on to the crowbar out of worry that if I let go of it, I will only need to buy it again later.

Yet, if I try to determine the probability of me having a need to use the crowbar, I find that I shouldn’t worry about it. Crowbars are used for prying things. Our house is pretty nice the way it is and I don’t have any project that I’d need a crowbar for. Neither I or my husband are into carpentry. The claw on our claw hammer is a pretty good tool for prying if we ever need it. If life continues as it is into the future for at least ten years, the probability of an occasion to use the crowbar is very very low. Probably near .25%. I can now put the crowbar in our discard box.

I’m afraid my stuff won’t go to the right place.

Let’s put this fear in perspective. When a young girl puts her newborn baby up for adoption, she would be justified in her concern that her baby will go to the right place. In comparison to this, inanimate objects deserve much less worry.

It is good to put some effort into making sure the stuff that you get rid of goes to the right place, but you have to know where to draw the line. Too much concern for everything means that the burden of de-cluttering anything becomes prohibitively heavy.

One of the fastest, easiest methods of getting your stuff to the “right place” is to drop it off at the donation center of the nearest thrift store. The economic value of thrift stores is that they are an aggregation of many different types of objects that would be difficult to find homes for individually. They are a place that many people can come and pick out what they want and like. There is a higher probability that your precious whatsit will find a buyer there than if you were to take all your time and ask all your friends if they need it. The advantage to you is that while your whatsit is waiting for a buyer, it is not taking up space in your house any more, and you get a tax deduction for a charitable contribution.

Your main two concerns should be getting lightly used articles to a place where they can be used, and getting recyclables where they should go. But some stuff is going to have to go to the landfill. Accept that you’ve done your best and let go.

I’m afraid I won’t have anything left to give my children.

The best thing besides your love and attention that you can give your children is to keep a journal. Journals are like a piece of yourself; they communicate all the stories and memories you choose to record. When you are gone from the earth, your children will appreciate having your journals the most, perhaps even more than having many photos of you.

I’m afraid that if I let go of something sentimental, I’ll forget the memory.

Many organizing professionals advocate taking a picture of your sentimental items. My problem with this advice is that it doesn’t fully seem to deal with the difficulty. The difficulty is caused because there are good memories and feelings associated with the item and those feelings have to be honored and validated in a way that is as satisfying and long-lasting as keeping the item would be.

A better way to honor those memories is to write about them in a journal. By writing about the feelings, they are preserved for the future. The triumphs, dreams, and all the pleasant feelings can be communicated to others, which is part of the fun of remembering.

“I’m afraid that I wasted money on things and giving stuff away is like money down the drain.”

Time to confront that fear…ask yourself: how much money are you going to have to pay to get rid of your stuff? If the answer is what I think it is, you don’t have to pay anything. If you have to pay to let go, only then can you really say that giving stuff away is “money down the drain.”

If you are have a sneaking suspicion that you wasted your money on buying something, it isn’t going to do you any good to hang on to it. Repent and get rid of it! Confess that you have wasted your money, and then resolve that you will stop wasting your space. As commenter Rita@thissortaoldlife wrote on http://www.bemorewithless.com/2012/busting-your-biggest-clutter-fears/, “keeping the clothes I never wore would not get me the money back or justify the expenitures—and once the truth of their value (not much) was seen, I could not un-see it. Getting rid of them did remove the constant-visual reminder of the choices I regretted. It was much easier to move on and leave them in the past…”

If I let go of ______, someone in my family will be mad.

Is it your stuff or their stuff? If they have given it to you, then YOU are the one who gets to choose what to do with it, not them. If you are worried about them getting mad at you if you get rid of it, ask them if they want it. If they don’t want it, then you can get rid of it without fear. If they get mad after that, remind them that you have a right to do what you want with the stuff that belongs to you and remind them that you offered it to them beforehand.

Dealing with memorabilia--letters and cards

I just got done with a week of helping my mom search through her mom’s stuff to try to find journals, photos, movies, letters, important documents, and genealogical information. Let me tell you, it was a marathon week. It is one thing to find all of that stuff, and it is quite another to try to pare down the mass of it into something that is the MOST IMPORTANT.

The challenge becomes all the more arduous when the people whose stuff you are looking through were in the habit of keeping every letter, every greeting card, every picture. That was the case with my grandmother and grandfather. One thing that made it challenging to deal with was that all these letters and cards and other documents were not all kept in the same place. We kept finding caches of them—every dresser drawer seemed to have a little stash of letters and cards at the bottom of it. We found cards in among the knitting projects. We found cards and letters among the paint brushes. It began to seem like we’d have to look everywhere to make sure that we got them all. The first step in dealing with it was to consolidate all those caches into one place.

Then came the job of sorting through those cards and letters. Everyone has dreams of discovering a stash of their parents or grandparents love letters tied with an old ribbon, right? But what if you also discover letters from parents, letters from children, letters from siblings, letters from neighbors, and more? You can’t keep it all, and frankly, you shouldn’t keep it all.

But this raises the question—if you shouldn’t keep it all, how do you distinguish between what you should and shouldn’t keep, and what do you do with what you decide to not keep? How do you get rid of it in a way that still honors the people who sent the letters in the first place?

In the process of examining all that memorabilia, I was able to find some answers to those questions because of what I observed.

One of the best ways to help whittle down a card collection or a bunch of letters is to view them from the eyes of your descendants 4 generations in the future. Think about the kind of information they would want to know about and then look to see if that kind of information can be found in the letters or cards. How helpful are the cards and letters doing their job to communicate important information about names, dates, places of family history or character traits?

Observation #1: When people send greeting cards, they tend to not write much in them. 95% of the greeting cards we went through only had signatures. If you place a priority on keeping memorabilia with real meaning conveyed by the sender, greeting cards usually are meaningless. The way I began to see it, if the greeting card sender really cared that much about the message they wanted to convey, they would not have sent a greeting card to speak for them; they would have worked to find the words to say it themselves. It is the words written by the sender, not the words written by the greeting card publisher that have real, lasting meaning.

(Now, I know there are those who will argue that if a card is really pretty, it should be kept, but when you are dealing with a large stash of cards and letters, you need to be RUTHLESS and look for every excuse you can to get rid of the cards, otherwise you will end up burdened with Other People’s Stuff (hereafter referred to as OPS).)

So, the first step is to go through the entire pile quickly and get rid of all the greeting cards that have nothing written in them besides a signature.

Observation #2: Letters tend to share much more information about the person who sent the letter than the person who received the letter. (Love letters are an exception to this.) Because of this, letters tend to be more valuable to the sender as family history documents than to the receiver.

The second step is to sort all the remaining letters into piles according to who sent the letter or the card. That way, you’ll have all the letters from mom in one pile, all the letters from each sibling in its own pile, all the letters from friends in their own pile.

When all the piles are sorted by sender, get some manila envelopes and mail each pile to the sender if they are still living. Hopefully the letters will still have addressed envelopes, and you can tell by the postmark on the envelopes which return address is the most recent. Letters usually include little slices of history from the life of the sender, so when the sender gets a pile of letters back that they once sent, they get two benefits:

-They get the pleasure of knowing that their letters were important/interesting enough to be saved

-They get the pleasure of rereading what they wrote in the past. It can trigger pleasant memories. Put in order, those letters can even do the job of a personal journal, if they hadn’t kept one before.

In the case of my grandmother, she had letters from her sisters and her brothers and her mother. We can mail back the letters from her sisters and brothers because not only will it help them remember and preserve their own family history, but their descendants will have a chance to read through those letters someday and learn about them.

As for the letters to my grandmother from her mother, those were valuable to us because they were in our direct line of relationship.

Now, many people might stop here, but this doesn’t have to be the end of the process of evaluation. Whether you go further depends on the amount of correspondence and the amount of other memorabilia available to establish important family history facts.

If there is a lot of family history material to go through, it is important to find the best items to establish the important family history facts. You don’t have keep everything that establishes a fact, just the best things. Letters are very important if they are the only source for family history, but if other sources such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, etc., exist, then letters are better for conveying slices of life.

If there are a lot of letters that convey slices of life and other documents establish family history data, then you should not feel obligated to keep all those letters. Rather, you have a license to read through those letters and choose according to your own criteria which ones are best representative of the qualities that you want to remember about the sender. Are there any that display wit and humor? Are there any that display courage in the face of difficulty? Are there any that display a certain originality of thought or expression? Is any special devotion communicated? Don’t be afraid to use sticky notes to mark parts that especially please you as you read through. At the end of reading through the pile of letters, you will be able to see at a glance by how many sticky notes are applied which letters are most worth keeping. This will aid in making decisions about the relative value of each letter.

Extra credit: If you have old family letters that you want to make available to more people to read, consider setting up a blog devoted to your family history. You can scan the letters inherited or found and then post the images of them on the blog, along with careful explanations that will allow a viewer to understand them. This method of sharing is most effective if you have already whittled down the collection to the most important and significant letters. (Word of caution: Avoid embarrassing the living.)