Meaning-Makers vs. Horrible Pitchers
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Jill and I have a loving marriage, but we have our moments. Or should I say, “She has her moments!” I know I sound like I am placing blame, and that is because I am! You see, her horrible sin is that she is a “pitcher.” Not a baseball player, but someone who tries to pitch my good and valuable items. She calls me a “hoarder,” and I call her “heartless!” Since I was little, all my things were alive. Everything I got my hands on, I moved around as part of a living, evolving story. How could five-year-old me throw away a popsicle stick when it was my best friend Steve, in a story of overcoming a bully on the playground?
A three-year-old and a sixty-three-year-old me are not that different, after all! Both old and young me enjoy my things, and each one brings joy through memory. So, I was frustrated when I came across an article by a Jill-like person named Rose Gilbert Anderson entitled “An Important Thing to Do for Your Children Before You Die.” The article inspires the reader to care for their grown children by downsizing. I am caring for my daughter, because she will get my 7th-grade baseball glove when I die! I know she will want all my theology, philosophy, and management books.
I know I need to part with some of my memorabilia, especially when I get ready to retire. What “meaning-makers” (I prefer that term over “hoarder”) like me must consider is that nothing lasts forever. The loss of an item does not mean the loss of the experience, or the loved one who gave it or experienced it with me. Our things express part of our story, but they should not define us. We are more than what we possess.
Today, pray for God to help us define ourselves beyond our things. If we are blessed to live into retirement and decades longer, we will face the need to downsize. Help us redefine ourselves with fewer things, while continuing to reflect on the richness of our life experiences. On a day when you feel particularly close to God and appreciate that faith remains the only necessary thing to covet, take a moment to appreciate the gift the pitcher in your life provides. Still, we are imperfect beings, so I trust God will allow me to give the little pitcher in my life a difficult time now and then.
