Pineridge Blog

It Is Time

Last week I spent several days helping my mom clean out. She is thinking about moving to a smaller place that is easier to take care of, so she needs to “downsize.” She has lived at John Knox Village since 2005 when she and my dad sold their house and moved. My dad was suffering from the end stages of Parkinson’s disease. Someone offered to buy their house, and they knew that opportunities to sell a house in a small town can be rare, so they packed up and moved in a matter of weeks. And as it turned out my dad was far closer to the end of his life than anyone knew, in fact he died just a few months later. It was a comfort to him at the end of his life that they had made the move where they both could be cared for.

We started with some boxes in my mom’s garage that had been there since their hasty move in 2004. Most of the boxes contained things my dad had packed--from his desk, his growing up, his work, and his woodcarving tools. And as a child of the Depression, there was also a lot of stuff he couldn’t part with in his life—lots of things held together with duct tape.

Once we started we had fun reminiscing a bit about things we hadn’t seen in years. And we were able to let go of most of it. I still have the memories of my father, but I realized we didn’t need to keep the stuff anymore. Some things we gave away, some we recycled, some we put in the dumpster and a few things we kept, at least for now.

We have been talking about going through that stuff for ten years. Every time I saw the boxes I had a sinking feeling that it would be overwhelming to go through it all. Impossible to let go. But in the end we realized that it was time.

Sometimes we say almost casually, “Let go and let God,” as if were easy or natural. I believe it. I trust God to take care of it, whatever it is. But sometimes it is just hard to let go. And I am coming to really appreciate that God is in all of it, the holding on and the letting go.

“There is a time to keep and a time to throw away,…
God has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Ecclesiastes 3)