Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Waste Transfer

                                Photo Credit: Ali Hashisho 

This weekend I went through the overstuffed garage and got rid of a bunch of stuff that I had been hanging onto for years. Most of it was trash - broken things that I had aspirations of fixing one day. In Colorado, it would have been so expensive to get rid of that stuff. We had to pay by the pound for all of the trash we wanted to dump at the waste transfer station. But here in Hawaii, I just bring it all to the transfer station and throw it away.

No questions asked.  

No money needed. 

I suddenly thought of what it means to be a Christian. I don't have to pay anything to get rid of my trash - the broken mistakes and sins of my past. I just bring it to Him, and throw it away. Can you imagine if we had to pay to get rid of our trash from the past? Lord knows I would either be broke or buried in my mistakes.  But I'm a Christian.  This means He has already paid the price for me by sending His only Son to die on the cross. The only thing I have to do is decide- make the choice - to let it all go. I have to choose to give Him the sins and mistakes of my past.  

Discarding old, broken or useless stuff is so essential to moving forward. For me this is the most daunting part of the task- choosing what to let go of, and then, actually making the commitment to let it go. Just like the material things in my garage, I found that sorting through my past was an overwhelmingly, difficult task. Rather then commit to tackling it, I chose for so many years to ignore it- tuck it all away neatly in a garage to deal with another time when I was emotionally and spiritually stronger. But my garage is really full. There's just no more room.

I decided to take an inventory of all the broken things from my past. I took 5 minutes to write down as many as I could think of. I limited myself to 5 minutes because I knew I could easily spend an hour writing this list. Some were significant events, some were seemingly insignificant things that I was still holding on to.  I made a decision to choose two items from my list to lay at the feet of Jesus. I chose to discard these two items to make room in my heart for better things. If you're an emotional hoarder like I am, you can imagine what a chore this was for me.

But I did it -
I wrote it all down.
Then I prayed.
Then I opened my bible and read.
Then I threw my two things away.

I physically crumpled my two thing up and threw them in the trash. Then and there,  I felt lighter. 
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 No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead
(Philippians 3:12-13 NLT)

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