Excess is not abundance. Joyful choose the better part.

Idols once they won you, charmed you,

Lovely things of time and sense.

Gilded thus does sin disarm you...

Arm yourselves, therefore--Been back in Naperville a week now and will stay until the end of this week. Starting to be militant against two decades of clutter, the result of parents who never permitted throwing stuff away. It's exhausting; realizing clutter for what it truly is--putting something off to evaluate, sort out, deal with later--be it mental or relational or any other kind of clutter, I feel its weight and entanglement like I've never before. Of laying up our security in all the wrong homes, of passively holding onto stuff or retaining habits because change takes gruel.


But it all adds up and chokes the abundance right out of life, the purpose out of a house/home, the wholeness out of relationships.

Purge, purge, purge. Confront all this stuff and the memories that are evidence of where my heart has been and what it has contained, and the closets of misplaced affections or mistakes or hurts or distraction that I have held onto--to let go of later.

All of life is repentance--repentance now. Lord let me choose You, now. Help me to stop putting off the choice no matter who tells me it is right to do so, or how sentimental or comfortable or attached or overwhelmed I feel. When I say I'll choose You later, I'm choosing not-You now.

Luke 10:41-42. I have accumulated much to be anxious and troubled about.  Much that belies true security and value. Heart, see true worth. Learn to live more with less.

This hymn keeps playing through my head to remind me of hope. My favorite rendition of it is a mash-up to the tune of "Tis so sweet."

Have you heard Him, seen Him, known Him?

Is not yours a captured heart?

Captivated by His beauty,

worthy tribute haste to bring.

Let His peerless worth constrain thee,

crown Him now unrivaled king.

What has stripped the seeming beauty from the idols of this earth?

Not a sense of right or duty,

but the sight of peerless worth,

the beaming of His beauty,

the unveiling of His heart.

What have we who have companied with Him to do with idols?