Hello, friends. I’m so thrilled to have my dear friend Stephanie Grace Whitson as a guest blogger today. Steph is the first author I ever met in person. I wrote her a fan letter after reading her wonderful Prairie Winds series. Then, when I discovered she lived in Nebraska where I was headed to visit a friend, Steph and I arranged to have coffee together. My first novel had just been published so Steph and I had lots to talk about, and we’ve been fast friends and book brainstormers ever since. Welcome, Steph, and thank you for a blog post that hit very close to home for me!
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The Cupboard
We all have one. We can’t reach it without a stepstool. We rarely open it. And yet, it’s overflowing with things treasured or, perhaps, things forgotten. It’s gathering dust we don’t see, holding faded memories, hovering in the background of daily life like a cobweb waiting to be swept away on some future day when we are finally forced to deal with our stuff.
Or will someone else have to do that for us?
These past few weeks I have been that someone, dealing with a single gentleman’s stuff, now that my husband is his permanent guardian and said gentleman no longer has the mental capacity to make everyday decisions.
The process is alternately fascinating and heartbreaking. It is also exhausting. Most of all, it is convicting. Will my children have to do this for me? The question hovers over the process and it sounded loudly when I opened the cupboard above the refrigerator in the gentleman’s kitchen. The one crammed full of his mother’s china—his mother, who passed away thirty-four years ago.
Thirty-four years of dust had gathered on that set of lovely but unused dishes. Waiting for me to get them down and try to find them a new home, because this house is no longer a home. It’s an empty shell cluttered with the ashes of three lives; a man, a woman, and the son who never married.
This morning, our pastor’s sermon took us to 2 Timothy 1:4: “No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.” And that cupboard of china flashed in my mind, right along with the question, “WHAT ENTANGLES ME?”
Could it be that I, too, have unused china taking up space and energy in a life that should be occupied with better things?
Raising five children as a middle-class American allows for things like hobbies and collections—in my case studying history, quilting, and reading. Add to that a career as a historical fiction author, and you have a recipe for mounds of fabric and patterns and pincushions and books—oh, the books in my life. Books in every room. Shelves of books. Stacks of books. Dozens of reference books. Dozens of “to-be-read” books.
And now, as I sort and price and seek new homes for a lone gentleman’s stuff, I ask myself what entangles me. Will I actually take time to read all those “to-be-reads”? Why am I keeping that magazine with the quilt pattern I might make “someday”? What about that box of Christmas ornaments I haven’t used in years because I don’t put up the 6-foot tree anymore? Goodness, what about the tree itself up in the loft of the garage?
Will my children have to deal with the books, the fabric, the patterns, the unused Christmas tree?
I am determined to answer no—at least insofar as I can. Because when I graduate to heaven, my stuff shouldn’t entangle anyone else in hours and days of sorting and relocating. It shouldn’t entangle me, either, in the days the Lord has left for me.
Thanks to those dusty dishes and the Apostle Paul and my faithful pastor, I am convicted to prayerfully seek a better balance between what I need to serve the One who enlisted me as a soldier and what is simply the ignored accumulation of seventy-three years of living. I may not be ready for Swedish death cleaning (I read a book about that), but I am ready to deal with the china in the cupboard above the refrigerator in my kitchen.
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Stephanie Grace Whitson began writing fiction when inspired by the lives of pioneers laid to rest in an abandoned cemetery near her home in southeast Nebraska. Her first novel was published in 1995. She’s a two-time Christy Award finalist, Selah Award finalist, and winner of an RT Book Reviews Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Inspirational Romance. Stephanie’s family, her church, and historical research all rank high on her list of “favorite things.” Learn more at www.stephaniewhitson.com
Stephanie’s newest novel is Love at First Light, which she describes as “Beauty and the Beast…in a cemetery.” Click on the book cover to purchase or to see more of her many titles.
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Dear readers, before you go, I wanted to let you know that one of my novels is FREE in ebook form today, thanks to BookBub. Breath of Heaven was a Foreword INDIES Gold Award Winner and also won Best Fiction in the Missouri Writers Guild President’s Award. Click on the book cover at right to grab your copy (and of course, I hope you’ll buy the first two books in the series while you’re shopping!)
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I can relate. My mom inherited her parent’s and her brother’s “stuff”. In turn, I inherited all of it plus my parent’s stuff. At the time we had the big house and big storage space in the shed so we had room and kept the majority of it. Eight years ago, with no responsibilities any longer and retired, we decided to make our dreams come true while we could. We sold out, downsized and built the forever home we always dreamed of in the destination we loved and often vacationed in. It meant taking a strong, hard look at things. Did they really MEAN something to us or was it just because they use to belong to someone we loved? Once we got started, the easier it was to release the majority of it either by giving it away or selling it, it not only freed us, but gave others a chance to actually us the stuff instead of it sitting in a draw or closet somewhere. Then we found that things we thought we would keep took on a new light once they were eventually unpacked and more went out the door in our new hometown. Even as I type, some 8 years later, one little tiddy up had us deciding to do a “spring cleaning” here in August. Again we are seeing things with new eyes and as older senior citizens, like you thinking about things we kept but still haven’t ever used or that were boxed up all this time and never looked at since put away. We are in the process of collecting all this “stuff” all to be disposed of soon as we get it all done. Isn’t it amazing out “stuff” accumulates or how time has one looking at “things” differently?
2clowns at arkansas dot net
Welcome to IBLAF, Steph. So glad to have you here. This summer, I passed china and crystal along to my granddaughter, and I am determined to keep thinning and thinning and thinning. But some things tug at me. They are only meaningful to me. When I die, my daughters won’t even know why I have them. Sigh. I’m being ruthless with the easier things first. Hopefully the extra space will encourage me to be ruthless with the harder things eventually.
I’ve read several books by Stephanie Grace Whitson, which I loved, & donated to my church library.
Thank you for the timely reminder–to clean out my closet. Yikes! What a chore–for me, but worse if my daughter or granddaughter has to do it!
Thanks so much for joining us on the blog today, Steph! I agree with Robin. Some things won’t have meaning for anyone else, but they bring me great joy and remind me of happy memories. I’m happy that my daughters do like my “stuff” and I pass it along to them as often as I can. (Since I’m a maximalist, I quite often bring in new things, but my goal is one-in-one-out, and thanks to my daughters and our church’s annual garage sale, I do pretty well at that.