Most days I take for granted all of the stuff that I have.  I even reason with myself as to why I really must keep this item or that trinket.  Then there are the days when I have just had it, when the overwhelming sense of stuff just makes me want to throw it all away.

Mostly I lean towards the first one.  I have a theory that the need-to-keep-stuff tendency gets diluted with each generation, where my grandparents (who lived through the Depression) keep almost everything, and my mother keeps a lot of things, and I only keep some things.  My kids will probably throw everything away (though I suppose that’s not good either).  I know the mindset of my mom and grandparents is just-in-case:  it might be needed someday.  For me, I would rather not store things for the sake of “someday.”

So I had a garage sale yesterday.  It was highly satisfying to get my basement cleared out from all of the excess stuff that didn’t fit into our new house.  When we moved last year in October, the point was to save money by being in a smaller house.  However, that means downsizing the stuff, too, and we definitely did that.

But there was a sense of disappointment, too, as I experienced hagglers working their angles and convincing me to part with a set of bowls that were probably worth $50 a piece for the low price of $10 for the pair, and a hand-made piece of wooden furniture for $19.  It was also disappointing to see items (like the full-sized bedding that we no longer needed) that I was sure someone could use just sit on the tables until it was 4pm.  Then I loaded them up and dropped them off at Salvation Army, just to avoid taking them back into my house.

Here’s the biggest kicker of all:  someone COULD HAVE used them.  We had a family from church who had a house fire last night (please pray for them), losing everything (but not each other, thank the Lord!).  I wish I would have been less proactive post-garage sale and just sat on that stuff for a day.  Half of it were things they could have used.  Maybe my family was right after all.