April 24, 2026 - Good Morning! It’s Friday, April 24.
I’ve got a barn on my property. It’s red - which I believe is a law. But since I’m not a farmer, it’s not filled with cows and hay. It’s filled with lots of boxes which are filled with lots of stuff, all the stuff that I don’t have room for in my house. Lately I’ve been taking advantage of the lovely spring weather to do some spring cleaning. I’ve been going through barn box after barn box, and I’ve been left with a single thought - Why in the world did I keep all this stuff?
We Americans love our stuff, and we hate to throw it out. When facing the choice (as Solomon put it) “to keep or to cast away”, we recite the Hoarder’s Creed . . . SOMEDAY I MIGHT NEED IT! Our compulsion to hang onto things gave rise, in the late 1960’s, to the self-storage industry, a business that started right here in Texas, and is now worth over 50 billion dollars. We Americans hang onto our stuff.
And now, since this is a devotional column, we must acknowledge that there are some other things that we hang onto as well. Things like bitterness, envy, grudges, jealousy, guilt, anger, resentment. But living like that, carrying all of that on our backs, isn’t God’s best life for us. In Ephesians 4:31-32, He offers a recipe for spiritual spring cleaning - “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
Meet you back here on Monday,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
