Rearranging Things

Rearranging Things

I’m not sure if you could call it home improvement, but change is underway. I’m rearranging my study and its books, trying to assess what should stay and what should go (no easy task for a book-loving, literary nerd).

Less than half the books have been reshelved; the others stand in hip-high stacks around the dining room, forming a kind of ad hoc, uneven wainscoting that’s growing on me although it’s only temporary. But the change hasn’t stopped there. Within a week of the book purge, my furniture got in on the deal as well.

My sofa of nearly twenty years (and whatever coins were underneath its cushions), together with my dining table and four chairs, have made their way to a new home across town. They’ll soon provide seating for six young urban missionaries in a rented town house, combined with other odds and ends furnished by members of my church. When the call went out for furniture, I thought, Why not? There are six of them and only one of me. I have other places to sit. When one of our pastors shared with me the amount of their weekly individual allowance for food, I realized I’d spent it that day—on lunch.

Hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll meet the girls who are settling in and maybe bring a meal to fill that old, familiar table. Oddly enough, I don’t miss it much. And that fact makes me wonder if my rearranging is anywhere near done. I’ve questioned lately if I’m living rightly: whether I have just enough or too much, if abundance has become the expectation and my own comfort the rule of thumb for acquiring more. Do I share willingly what is mine? Am I a good neighbor? A generous friend?

I pray so. Because God has been very good to me. I don’t know where the tipping point lies between too much and not enough, but I hope I find it. Until then, I invite the one who owns it all to gracefully rearrange what is mine in any way that pleases him, in the name of love.

Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.

Proverbs 30:8, NIV