An Abundance of Stuff

I have to be honest. A part of me really wants to take an indefinite break from blogging simply because I have so much going on in my life right now. Blogging just feels like one more thing on my list of things to do. When I do write a post, I don't feel like I have the time to put into promoting it. Then, I don't have the time to put into reading other people's posts. I can tell my blog is suffering for it. BUT...I don't want to take a break because I have things I want to share and ideas for posts. So, I'm going to try to keep at it. Just know that I may not post consistently; and I may not respond quickly to emails. I'm also doing my best to try and read your posts.

Anyway...one of those things keeping me busy is the fact that we moved to a new apartment. We still live in the same city. We've been wanting to move and looking for a while now, but nothing seemed right. I think this apartment we finally found is going to suite our needs perfectly, though.

We had some complications with moving and it has been quite a process. We moved completely by ourselves minus about 4 hours that we hired movers to help move furniture and bigger, heavier stuff. (Sidenote: Movers are amazing! If you can afford them, hire them!) The time we were moving was during the Great Southeastern Snowstorm 2014. It snowed quite a lot for the south. Things shut down for a few days and school (aka my job) shut down for the whole week. This gave me more time to move, but because I'm at a year round school we have to make up 4 days on Saturdays now. {insert pouty face here}

I learned something while trying to move all of our stuff by myself- we have a lot of stuff! Too much stuff! One of the things we loved about this new apartment is that it has a storage room where we can keep all our extra stuff. I figured out many years ago when my grandmother passed away and my family had to sort through and do something with all of her stuff that you really can't take it with you when you go. That inspired me to try and not have too much stuff. Then, last year I read 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker. That inspired me even more to reduce the amount of stuff we have. I'm a cleaner and an organizer. So at least once a year, I go through every room and clean out, get rid of, and reorganize things.

Even with all those things in mind and cleaning out our stuff on a regular basis, we still have too much stuff. Now I'm going to go ahead and call my husband out and say that a lot of our extra stuff is his stuff. Much to my annoyance, he gets very attached to things and doesn't want to get rid of them. I mean...we live in an apartment and he has 2 axes and a chainsaw. He has NO reason to be cutting things down. But I digress...

We moved our necessities at the beginning of the week and still had car load after car load of extra non-essential junk. A picnic basket we might use once a year. A beach umbrella we might use once every other year. A keyboard I might feel like playing. Golf clubs for my husband who I have never in the 7 years we've been together seen play golf. It was very eye opening.

It made me think about people in this country and other countries who have a fraction of what I have. It made me think about missionaries who get rid of most of their belongings to move to another country and serve the Lord. It made me think about orphans and children in foster care whose belongings can fit in one bag. It made me think about people who've lost their belongings in a fire or natural disaster.

That helps put things into perspective. It's just stuff. More stuff than the majority of the world has. Yet, we're always wanting more and better stuff. It's ingrained in us that we don't have enough or the best. We're never satisfied. It's really sad actually.

So as I've been moving this past week, I realized that I have more stuff than I really could need in a lifetime. I need to remember that when I think I want something else or something new.

I don't really know how to end this post. I feel like I could ramble on and on about this. It kind of makes me wish I lived in a time when life was simpler and people weren't as materialistic.

What about you? Do you feel like you have too much stuff? Do you think it's okay to have a lot of stuff?