A Ramble About Losing Everything

     When my family and I first moved back to Southern California just after Aidan was born in the fall of 2002, we could only bring what we could carry in our four door Ford Tempo. An entire apartment's worth of our possessions which we had returned from Alberta, Canada with had to be left behind in Idaho. At first, we had thought we would only be there for a visit temporarily, but our stay became more permanent than we had anticipated. Our belongings were put into storage in an old grain silo on my in-laws ranch. The next time I saw them in 2005 and then actually tried to retrieve them in 2010, they were dusty, some were molding, some just weren't usable at all.
     When we moved out to Tennessee from California in the summer of 2009, we had to reduce all of our earthly possessions to only what we could fit in our minivan. Again, an entire apartment's worth of furniture, books, toys, clothes, mementos of our lives, and other things. We gave away as much as we could. Sold some of it. A lot of it had to end up in the dumpster behind the apartment building. We had lived in Tennessee for almost a year, had gotten into a three bedroom apartment in Erin. Again, we had acquired more furniture, more stuff. And then the thouand year storm hit, flooding the Mississipi, and turning much of the county where we lived into lakes and ponds where none should have existed. Another storm was moving in, and we made the choice to leave to protect our family from what looked like another disaster. Again, we packed up only what we could fit in our van, and had to offload the rest and leave it behind.
     From Idaho in 2013, it was a similar story as we tried to move down to Arizona to be closer to my dad who had recently come to live there with my sister. And again a few months later when we had to pack up and move all of our earthly belongings into a broken down R.V. and set off on a trip even we didn't know where it would end up. God knew. It was God who arranged all of it. Finally, we had landed in Arkansas where we broke down on my uncle's property in the fall of 2013. We spent until the next July praying about what to do until the only option which was presented to us was to leave behind only what we couldn't carry in suitcases on a bus back to California. This included beloved pets that had been with us for years.
     Why do I go into all of this? My family and I have "lost everything" many times. In every case, we believed we were going in the direction God wanted us to go, and trying to do what we understood Him wanting us to do. It was always painful. Our lives have never revolved around "stuff," but to say that it never impacted us would be a lie.
     But one thing I have learned the hard way through all of it, is that we don't actually get to keep the "stuff" we collect. All of it, eventually, is temporary and can be lost in the blink of an eye. We are given use of these things for a period of time, and then they are gone. The same is true of relationships, ideas, things by which we identify who we are even. When we speak of those things that "belong" to us, in reality, we are only allowed to hold them for a while until we have to let them go, because nothing, not even our bodies or our "egos" actually belong to us. We're allowed to use them for our own personal growth, provision, maturity, and so on. But we cannot be said to truly possess them, and when the time comes where they can no longer serve a beneficial purpose, if needed, they will be taken from us, pruned from us, so that we can continue to make positive progress and growth.
     Clinging to anything which is temporary as though it weren't is a lost cause. It may bring you comfort and security in the short term, but the very same thing can impede your growth and progress in the long game once you reach a certain point. And, fundamentally, none of it actually belongs to any one human being individually, but it all belongs to God who lends freely as we need it to function. And because everything belongs to God who, like a father with his children, lends freely, everything also belongs to those who belong to Him, and we have no need to cling to anything.