We have been spring cleaning. We looked around our house and wondered where all this stuff came from: an exercise machine, college textbooks, old televisions, and computers, yes, books and books and books (23 boxes to our Public Library), shoes and shirts I hadn’t worn in a decade, a canoe that hadn’t touched water since our son was thirteen (he’s now 33) and increasingly more.

I confess this was hard for me. Even though we hadn’t used the canoe in twenty years, there’s a voice in my head that says, “But what if…? Maybe we’ll need to cross the French Broad River or maybe we’ll take a canoe trip down the Rhine River or maybe…?”

Our things not only remind us of the past; they also hold out a possibility for an imagined future. Maybe I’ll suddenly use the weight machine every day. It’s hard to let go of that part of us we remember just as it’s hard to let go of that part of us we envision. Our things aren’t just trophies of the past; they are heralds of a future as well.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It is life near the bone that is sweetest.” I think he meant that sweetness comes from shedding our imagined life of rewriting the past or inventing the future and instead setting our feet on where we are in this moment. What I need now is not stuff but a clear head and heart. My things can tempt me into a past that never was and a future that never will be.

Of course, I still have way more than 23 boxes of books on the shelf, and of course, I still have way more than I need. But I feel lighter—which is less about spring cleaning and more about aligning myself with God’s promise of resurrection. Lent is the season of the light lengthening to remind us that anything is possible. Mary Magdalene isn’t going to the tomb with her things but just with her hope and the Lord’s promise.

Now that some of our baggage has been carted away, what’s left is the real work of internal cleaning: letting go of my prejudices and pre-conceptions of how the world works; of the ways I have labelled others and myself; of my notions that my expectations of the future have anything to do with what God has in mind.

I need a yard sale for my mental baggage so that I can get closer to the bone where the sweetness lies.

+Porter