I Keep Everything And I Know It

You filled the bag on Saturday and unpacked it on Sunday.

Not all of it. Four things came back out, and you did it quickly, without much deliberation, in a slightly furtive way even though there was nobody in the house.

The bag is still by the door. It has been by the door since Sunday. It is lighter than it was and you have not taken it anywhere.

And you have been carrying a small unpleasant feeling about yourself since then, and it has a word attached, and the word is one you would not say out loud.

I want to go straight at that word.

You are not a hoarder. That is not what this is, and I am not going to use that word or any of its neighbors about you, because you do not have a condition, you have a habit of keeping things and a great deal of shame about it that you picked up somewhere.

And the shame is not from the things. It is from the last fifteen years of being told, constantly, in every direction, that keeping is a defect.

Think about how much of that you have absorbed. Every program about a house is about removing. Every article is about letting go. There is an entire industry built on the idea that a person with fewer objects is a better and lighter person, and you have been marinating in it since about the time your children were small.

So let me say what this article does at the top, and then I am not going to move off it.

Nothing gets thrown away here.

Not one thing. Not a single object. This article does not end in a bag going anywhere, and there is no suggestion that you should reduce anything by any amount. Your things are staying exactly where they are.

What I want to change is what you think about yourself while you keep them.

She kept all these things and pondered them

There is a sentence about Mary that appears twice in Luke, and the verb in it is the one you have been ashamed of.

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. (Luke 2:19, King James Version)

Mary kept all these things.

The shepherds had come and said what they had been told, and everybody around her wondered at it, and while they were all reacting, she did something different. She kept it.

Now, that is about words and events rather than objects, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But look at what keeping is treated as there.

It is not hoarding. It is not clutter of the heart. It is treated as the wise thing, the deep thing, the thing that distinguishes her from everybody else in the scene who is exclaiming and then moving on.

And notice it is not passive. She kept them and pondered them. She went back over them. She held things and turned them and did not let them go, over years, and Luke records it approvingly and then records her doing it again after the temple.

So there is a way of keeping that scripture calls good, and its content is: this mattered, and I am not letting it dissolve.

That is what you were doing on Sunday when four things came back out of the bag. You were not failing to declutter. You were declining to let something dissolve, and you had no framework in which that was allowed, so you experienced it as weakness.

Every one of those four came out because it carried something. You could tell me what, for each of them, right now, without thinking.

There is a keeping that the written word calls wise, and holding on to what carries something has never once been a defect. Luke 2:19 has Mary keep all these things and ponder them in her heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody taking four things back out of a bag on a Sunday.

Objects hold people

Here is the practical half, and it is about what you are actually keeping.

Almost nothing you keep is being kept for its use.

That is why the advice never works on you. All of it is built on usefulness: have you used it in a year, would you buy it again, does it earn its space. Those questions are answerable about a spatula and useless about the other thing, and the other thing is most of what is in that house.

You are keeping people.

The cardigan is your mother. The papers are a version of you that had that job. The thing from the kitchen is a house you do not live in any more, and the small ugly object nobody else would want is a person who is not here, and every one of them is a handle on something that is otherwise not reachable.

That is not sentimentality and it is not a weakness of character. It is how memory works in human beings. Memory is not stored in your head alone; it is stored in objects and places and smells, and an object is a genuine mechanism for reaching a person, not a substitute for one.

So when the guidance says the memory is not in the thing, that is simply false. Some of it is in the thing. That is why you cry when you find something in a drawer, and you would not cry at the idea of it.

And here is the cost of not knowing this. Because you have accepted that keeping is a defect, you have spent years unable to enjoy any of it. You cannot look at your own things with any pleasure, because looking at them means confronting the fact that there are a lot of them and that you are the sort of person who has them.

That is the actual loss here, and it is not shelf space.

What you keep is holding people rather than uses, and an object has never once been a substitute for the person it reaches. The written word has a woman keep things and turn them over in her heart for years, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who cannot look at her own things with any pleasure.

Pick one up and say why

So here is the assignment, and it does not move anything anywhere.

Pick up one thing you have kept and say out loud why you kept it.

One thing. Something you know you would not be able to explain to a stranger. One of the four that came out of the bag would do.

Hold it. And say, out loud, in the room: I kept this because it was my mother's. Or: I kept this because it is the only thing left from that house. Or: I kept this because he gave it to me and I do not have anything else he gave me.

Out loud, and to nobody.

And that is the whole assignment. The thing goes back exactly where it was.

Here is what saying it does, and it is worth the awkwardness of standing in a room talking to yourself.

At the moment, every kept thing in that house is unexplained. It sits there mutely, and the only sentence you have about the whole collection is a general one about how you keep too much. Speaking one reason out loud replaces the general sentence with a specific true one, and specific true sentences are much harder to feel ashamed of.

You will also notice, saying it, that the reason is good. That is the part that catches people. In your head it feels like an excuse. Out loud, in your own voice, it is just a reason, and it is a perfectly sound one, and there is nothing to be defended against.

And do not do it for everything. One. This is not an inventory and there is no exercise here that ends with you having justified your house to anybody.

You are able to say one reason out loud and hear that it is a good one, and it has never once needed to be an excuse. Luke 2:19 calls the keeping and the pondering good, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody holding something in an empty room and saying why.