Read, Write, Love, Repeat

As I unpacked boxes from our cross-country move, I found they were filled with not only our earthly possessions, but contents that created interesting tasks that I had not necessarily bargained for.

Prime example:  all I wanted to was take out my jewelry and hang all my necklaces on my cute and recently-purchased jewelry rack from World Market.  What I got was 45 minutes of untangling.  Oh. My. Word.  Not what I wanted from my day.

I looked into the handbag that had housed my necklaces between their old home in my Sacramento closet and their new home in my Watauga closet and was taken aback at the mess that was there.  They weren’t tangled when I packed them.  Were there gremlins in the moving truck that snuck in and intentionally intertwined each piece inextricably with every other one???  Deep breath.

I’m a girl her loves her some accessories.  Those who know me know this well.  But I had no time for this.  It was all I could do not to just throw the whole thing out and buy new cute jewelry.  There’s this accessory store here called Sam Moon that is like about 10 Charming Charlie stores combined.  But I digress…

I wouldn’t, COULDN’T, throw out the tangled mess because ensnared among my rather large collection of fun and trendy costume jewelry was the gold cross necklace my husband gave me for my 25th birthday.  And the necklace he gave me when we were dating and I was still a wide-eyed teenager.  And the jewelry my children had bought for me and paid for with their own money over the years.  Things that were irreplaceable.  Priceless to me.  Which meant untangling all of it, the precious and exchangeable, the vital and the out-of-style-next-season-disposable, in order to save and retain what mattered the most.

How often do we look at a hard situation in front of us and just want to toss the whole thing out the window?  To just walk away from the painful process of fixing it, or even looking very closely, because it’s just too much?  Too hard. Too many hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and complicated relationships. Too much time.  Too much emotion.  Too much pain. Too many moving parts.  And we may ask ourselves how we EVEN GOT TO THIS PLACE, because it bears no resemblance to where we started, just like my tangled mess in the handbag.  But I have to remind myself that even within a painful place there is something worth salvaging, something precious and worth the time to tease out and untangle.  Something I would miss entirely if I just tossed the whole thing and went to Sam Moon.

So I sat there in my closet and untangled: carefully untwisting, untwining, and separating each piece from the snarled mess, then hanging it up, ready to be used.  Even the costume pieces are hung up and ready to go, not as vital for my life, but still usable and worth keeping.  Time well spent, choosing to pull out what was most important and not throwing it all away.

Take the time to look carefully at the hard places, my sweet friend.  See what you can walk away from and what God calls you to press through and salvage.  You won’t be sorry.