de-clutter day

Tuesday at Calvary is normally reserved for meetings, at least in the morning.  We’ve got meetings for the pastors, meetings for all staff, meetings for special break out groups, meetings for people to plan meetings for other people.  But not today.

Today was the All Staff De-Clutter Day.

We’ve grown and overgrown our office, spreading through the building like kudzu.  Our staff has some long-timers (I’ve been here since ’98, and Dorsey joined us soon after) but there’s also a lot of new and transient and incoming to our staff.  Our offices are in what used to be someone’s very fancy, very big house.  It’s served us well, but we’re definitely in need of some spacial reorganization.  We’ve been told to get ready to move out of the space we’re currently using, making way for a new occupant.

The first step in that process (as determined by some of those people who plan meetings for people) was to get rid of the gazillion pounds of junk extraneous miscellanea.  Our top-notch de-clutter organizers gave us a pep talk and an informative sheet that walked us through the process of determining what needed to keep and what needed to be jettisoned.  By the end of the day we had piles of VHS and cassette tapes, a veritable forest of of fake plants and wicker baskets, and enough 3-ring binders to choke an army.  I sorted through all my old sermon manuscripts, notes from every seminar I’ve ever attended, position papers that I wrote for my ordination 20 years ago…most of it went into the “recycle” pile.  Old pictures and mementos, unwanted books and cds, even some nice pieces of furniture…it all found its way down to the common room where it was sorted into a few rather large piles:
1.  Trash
2.  Donate
3.  Keep

The “Trash” pile was free for the pickin’, and I felt a little like the guys from that show (American Pickers) as I sorted through the piles.  One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.  Or it’s another man’s junk in a few weeks, but it feels like treasure now.  I scored a sweet coffee pot, a Nike pullover for Levi, some notebooks for the kids to scribble in, and a sweet Hannah Montana Goes to the Mall game for the girls.

They say that you’re supposed to feel better when you’ve cleaned out a place.  Kim told me so when we cleaned out the garage before turning it into a bedroom.

It’s a lie.  I hate throwing stuff away.  It doesn’t make me feel better; it makes my skin itch.  I want to go back to the piles and pull all of my stuff out of the mess, to de-clutter the de-clutter.  Oh well.  I guess we’re not all wired the same.

What about you?  Do you like to de-clutter or does it give you the heebie-jeebies?