When I moved from Florida to California seven years ago, I had to get rid of so much stuff that I felt like I had been in a fire or experienced a divorce. In a divorce, you often loose half your stuff and it really causes you to think how much importance you’ve assigned to your stuff. Stuff is my Baptist word, because I can’t say the other word.
My military records show that we moved to Florida with13,800 pounds of stuff, but the problem was that we’d been to Disney 12,000 times since then. Divorce can be a welcome time to get rid of stuff, but how do you get rid of stuff? In a divorce situation, you can sell stuff, donate stuff, throw stuff away or store stuff. But in the end, you have to decide, what is really important -- what goes and what stays?
It seems like the decision about stuff was simpler in September of 99 when Hurricane Floyd was cocked and loaded a hundred miles off Cape Canaveral. In preparation for the blow, we put shutters over the shell that held our stuff. With each screw I tightened, I felt like I would end up on the wrong end of that screw.
With the house enclosed and dark in hurricane shutters, my engineer neighbor came over to make sure I had a place to go. I thought he would try and be comforting, but instead he broke into "engineer speak." He calculated the wind strength, elevation of the sea wall and the elevation of our house. He then delivered his serious conclusion with a joking smile.
"Don’t worry," he said, holding his hand above his head and marking a spot against the wall, "the water will rise to about here. It won't flood your entire house." After he left I went about trying to put my kids back together. They were going through their stuff, washing it with their tears, trying to figure out what was too important to lose. Truth is, I was doing the same thing. Just before the friend's visit, it had seemed like we were doing all the right things to protect our stuff.
Jesus once had a visitor who also felt like he was doing everything right to protect his stuff. He kept the laws of his religion and had done all the right things since childhood, but he still lacked a spiritual center. He approached Jesus to ask what he must do to become whole.
Jesus told him to obey the laws of his religion, but the man insisted that he had done all those things since childhood. Then, sensing that the man was still imprisoned, Jesus identified the one thing he lacked - "go and sell all your 'stuff' and give the profit to the poor and your treasure will be in heaven."
The scripture tells us that the man left sorrowful because he could not bear to lose his stuff – even if it meant saving his soul. "What does it profit a man," Jesus would later ask, "if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?"
If this rich young man could not decide what stuff was important, how was I going to decide in the face of this hurricane?
The answer came the next day as I followed my wife's car over the causeway evacuation route. At the preplanned intersection, she continued west and I turned north to an evacuation shelter where I would be the chaplain for a military evacuation shelter.
Just a few hundred yards before our cars separated, I was still pondering whether I had forgotten any important stuff, when I saw the answer. Pressed up against the back glass of my wife's station wagon were my four kids waving good-bye kisses. "No worries," I thought as the tears welled, "I've remembered all the important stuff."
Please e-mail Chaplain Norris at norris@thechaplain.net or by letter at PO Box 19522 Sacramento, Calif. 95819-0522 You may also visit his Web site at www.thechaplain.net where you can see past columns or purchase his book, "No Small Miracles."