Urban Idealist

We’re packing. Again. It is disturbing to be me how much stuff we acquired in our time in the States. It was disturbing how much stuff we had when we got our shipment back from Europe. To be fair to ourselves, we thought for a few months that we were going to be staying in Portland for a while. And so we were preparing to that end. But now, all the goodwill shopping that we did was for not. We are again sorting, packing, and filtering the stuff that follows our lives around. 

This experience has given Jen and I a much different take on ’stuff’. To a degree, we are both developing a disdain for stuff. This year we have learned both not to grab a hold or to let go of things to quickly. We’re learning to be wise with what makes it into our suitcases. (i hope) We were talking today about how we wished that we had been even more brutal with what we shipped back to the US…hindsight is always 20/20. But we will have learned nothing through our experience if we don’t use this moment of clarity to inform our future. A wise person once told me….”You can learn from great experiences and you can learn from bad experiences, but whether or not you learn is up to you.”

I’ve been noticing lately in the Bible how often people make the same mistakes over and over…and over…and over. You may have heard of a guy in the Bible called Gideon. He was a leader in the tribe of Israel whom God called out to be ‘a might warrior’. One of the first things that Gideon did when he realized his calling was to go and tear down the phony idols people were worshipping. Fast forward through the fleece and the fighting….At the end of Gideon’s life, he had a memorial made from offerings given to him and guess what…people began to worship it! Then when Gideon died the people rebuilt the fake idols that Gideon had torn down and went back to worshipping them…just as they were when Gideon started. They forgot about the God that saved them and lead them to victory and went back to doing the same old stuff. 

I’m still a firm believer that the number one sin we as followers of Jesus commit is the sin of forgetfulness. God teaches us something, often times through the painful consequences of our bad decisions, and soon enough we’re at it again. And the cycle repeats and the depth to which we learn the lesson again goes deeper…at least I hope. I think the our challenge is to continually ‘be doers’ of the lessons that God teaches us, but bad habits die hard right? That’s why we have to be all the more committed to continually dragging these lessons into the light…

This post ended up being a lot longer than I thought, and has actually become a little more revealing about Jen and I’s desire to learn to live a bit more prepared to be on the go…for as pilgrim-like as we have been living, you would think that we would have had a chance to learn this lesson before…wait we did, and I forgot. 

Off to bed for now and back to packing tomorrow. Sifting through all the things that I hope I won’t later say, “What was I thinking keeping this around?”