I went out for tea with Teresa yesterday and found myself prompting one of her self-reflective questions with Jesus telling the young man who had given away pretty much anything and then asked what else he had to do, to give up everything else. Reminded myself of it this morning, as I gently placed (if it wasn’t a heavy glass vase, it might conceivably have been ‘stuffed’) the last item that will fit into my storage unit into it. Having emptied my house to be rentable, storage is bankrupting me, and when I re-open the storage unit door, I wonder if I possibly need all this, and can’t I just get rid?

And it’s not all – there’s still furniture in the house, and there’s still a whole shed to clear (which, despite hating throwing things out environmentally, I have come to terms with that it will be a case of hiring a small skip for a day next summer), not to mention the large amount of stuff which fits into my Cambridge abode and a spread of more boxes at mum’s house. I cannot possibly need or want all of it.

They say things like ‘if you haven’t worn it for a year, give it away’ – mostly for clothes, but then some of my favourite and now almost threadbare clothes I bought at least fifteen years ago. If it could be used, why bin it? I cleared through a lot of stuff last summer, and a lot of my remaining ‘stuff’ is books – mea culpa, I am both an academic and my father’s daughter. I also have at least three large boxes in storage marked ‘For The Parish’ – I feel like I shall arrive with a dowry – though whether those goodies get handed into my curacy or find a home in a shed waiting for my own parish and the right moment is yet to be revealed.

I have plates and pots and glasses and paintings and stuff. I could draw a line under everything that isn’t with me in Cambridge, because clearly those are the things that I need/can’t live without. Except that they’re the things I need for what I’m currently doing in Cambridge, not for general life, and even then I keep looking for things that I know I own and realising with sinking heart that I can perfectly visualise which box said item is in. I am so looking forward to having my things around me again.

And this makes me feel bad, because genuinely I’m not a particularly materialistic person (take the clothes I’m wearing out from fifteen years ago). Yes, you could get some techie geekery from me, but I don’t own a tv, a dvd player (although my screen attached to my pc does both these, not that I’ve learnt how to put a dvd in it yet) or an ipod or a fancy phone – mine was the cheapest smart phone in the shop when my 8 year-old samsung died, and I bought it, shame to say, purely because it was pink. I have little jewelry to speak of, in hindsight rather mirroring my grandmother’s attitude after a burglar took all her beautiful jewelry never to buy anything of any value again. Beyond 21st presents, not all of which survived my own burglary, nothing much to speak of there either.

So what’s in my boxes? And why haven’t I given more of it/them/stuff away? Or thrown it out? I’ve decided I probably need more time to lose more stuff. I did do (no, really) a huge amount of clearing last summer, and I’m much better these days at not collecting so much in the first place, but I’m tired, tired of living out of boxes, tired of having stuff I want to find for myself or to lend or give to someone else, in a box in a different city. Too tired physically and emotionally to skip more now. When I can put down roots next summer, things will be re-sorted as they come in. For now, enough.

And then I come back to how much I need to live with. And I remember the young man who Jesus told to give up everything everything, not just lots everything.

And I look longingly into my storage unit to boxes which I can’t even reach at the moment and I think about lives on hold, or which wouldn’t fit in to the smallest storage unit like mine. I remember the blog post about my dream home, with lockers for people to keep things safe, and how many of Sacred Trinity’s regular visitors this summer don’t even have enough to fill one of my lockers, and I am ashamed. I am comfortable and warm (now the heating’s fixed) and when I look around after all the boxes and clearout I still see stuff. And I am ashamed, and I am grateful and I am looking forward to unpacking those boxes into a space where I can begin – hopefully – to be useful to other people again.

And I pray for those people, who pack their lives into storage units because their families have broken up and they have had to move out, those whose jobs have been lost and moves have had to be made, those who have emptied deceased relatives’ houses and can’t yet bring themselves to throw away treasured memories from childhoods, and those who will never need a storage unit, for whom a storage unit might be the biggest space they’ve ever had to call their own, dry, warm and safe…

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