They say you can’t take it with you, but when you travel you have to take it with you! When I go to India for a month each year I have to fit everything I needed into two suitcases. Try to put everything you want and need for living and ministering for one whole month into 2 suitcases. Medicines, first aid materials, clothing, reading material, food, lessons and teaching supplies – it all adds up. It’s quite an experience to put your whole life into 2 suitcases – then to turn them over to minimum wage workers, and hope you’ll see them again on the other side of the world! It is difficult, but it can be done – and there’s something freeing and refreshing in knowing this.
We spend too much time housing and maintaining all our stuff. We house it, protect it, update it ,and add to it. Before long we end up serving our stuff instead of it serving us. We need a larger house for all of it, and more time and energy to maintain it. Pretty soon the tail is wagging the dog, the means has literally become the end.
Most of the people on this earth couldn’t come up with enough possessions to fill 2 suitcases, but for us Americans it is agony to limit what we own to that small amount. We count too much on ‘things’ for security and pleasure, for filling the voids in our lives. Better to cut back and have less so that we’re forced to really look at what matters; at what objects actually fill our needs. Imagine that for the next month you can only use what fits into 2 suitcases. What would you put in to them? Of all the stuff you own, what do you really need? (January 15, 2016, adapted from April 2004, Doylestown, PA).
Matthew 5-7 what you eat, do not even the flowers of the fields….
Is your stuff running your life? Do you serve it instead of it serving you? If so, confess your sin of materialism and wrong priorities. Ask God to help you change your attitude to your stuff. When you can, get rid of all you can – donating it or trashing it. Remember, though, its not how much or how little you have but your attitude to it that really matters.