Discard

Picking one word that will define the direction of the year can be daunting. As much as I loved having a word for 2014, I never picked out a word of the year for 2015. I thought about it many times but never got around to deciding on one that felt right. So, here I am talking about my newly picked word about 8 months too late.

Discard. 

That's about how this year is going. I'm discarding stuff I don't love, style ideas, hurts, and fears. I'm trying to anyway. It sounds like a rather melancholy word of the year and I suppose it could be, but it is also a freeing one.

A couple months ago, I did a big purge(see every post on that here). I went through a ton of stuff and mostly cleared out my "junk room". Guess what happened? It's back to where it was before. Part of the issue is storage but honestly, I just have too much stuff.

It's easy to hoard stuff when you love decorating and crafty things. Random things get stashed away because it might be useful someday in some craft project. Every scrap of material is kept to make pillows and picture mats and rag rugs and whatever the heck you think you might have time for eventually. I'm learning that all that time never comes.  

Along with all that extra stuff that's sitting around until sometime, I have a lot of stuff that used to be my style or that I might use for seasonal decorating. Which I almost never do, so remind me again why I have that porcelain bunny?

It's all too easy to hold on to hurts and fears right along with craft supplies and pretty decor. 

Every time I hit that publish button there's that fear that what I've said is a mess of boring drivel. And what if I fail at this blog thing? What if I succeed? All those fears have manifested themselves in a major case of writer's block. And so, between my life with the boys and my fears, the posts have been few and far between lately.

I'm finding that fear can also manifest itself in a mad case of hoarding. All that stuff I've been holding onto? All that stuff I haven't been able to part with for various reasons? That's rooted in fear too. A fear that if I give it all away, the future will arrive and all those extra picture frames and porcelain bunnies will be desperately needed. 

Except they're not.

Not really.

Nor are those fears.

Or those hurts. Especially those hurts that come from within the church, the one place that should be safe. This is a big one for me.

Legalistic religion has a way of hurting you deeply and crippling your ability to tell the difference between truth and error. It makes it harder to get close to people that haven't had similar experiences. Sometimes you see people from the past, things happen, and you realize that you still have some issues to work through. It's easier for me to forgive a person's individual actions but when there is a righteous anger toward the root of wrong theology that drives the individual's actions...that gets a bit trickier. 

I'm still stumbling through this mess. Hurts and fears are a bit harder to get rid of than porcelain bunnies. I'm finding that just recognizing what I'm feeling and acknowledging it helps me because then I can consciously work to discard those things. I can start doing things like writing posts like this that make me a little uncomfortable. It's all part go the process.

Are you a fear-hoarder like me?