Chipmunk
How to unstuff your life
Chipmunks can overstuff their cheek pouches to conceal and carry food.
Marie Kondo, minimalism, and just general decluttering is big right now. You want to declutter, dejunk and unstuff your life. But for too many of us, we act like this chipmunk with our overstuffed lives. While it looks cute on him, it’s not so cute when it happens in our lives.
We overstuff our closets, our refrigerators and our lives and end up feeling overwhelmed.
Why do we do this? Like the chipmunk, we seem to live our lives haunted by lack. Scurrying and stuff-stuff-stuffing our cheeks and our lives to over flowing. Fearful that we won’t have enough or be enough.
I talk about on the podcast how in the middle of feeling the need for a sugar hit, I find some old, chocolate Halloween candy and chomp on it without even registering what I’m eating. My jaws just methodically mash away as I furtively look around for a bigger sugar smack.
Am I hungry? No. But I do feel frantic, and haunted by lack. So I’m stuffing my face to quell my feelings.
This podcast is an excerpt from the Chipmunk chapter from my new book, This Outside Life.
How do we end up with lives stuffed full of character as opposed to just stuff?
I talk about what happened when my mother died of pancreatic cancer. How all her precious collections of figurines, costume jewelry and mountains of stuff suddenly seemed ridiculous and unnecessary. How difficult it was to find homes for all of it. And how I wanted my life to be about people and events and experiences and not just the accumulation of stuff.
In Acts 13:36 it is recorded that King David “had served God’s purpose in his own generation.” That is the ultimate epitaph you want. That God used you, in your generation, for His purposes. That is what character is made of. That has eternal value. That’s what Rick Warren calls the purpose driven life. That’s what I call the right stuff.
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You can download the Kindle/iPad version of This Outside Life for only $3.99 through September 30th!