Mission Organization and a Humbling Experience

If you know me just the slightest bit you know I am a little obsessed with organization. I like things clean, orderly, and labeled. My house definitely follows the motto, "A place for everything, and everything in it's place". Before we had Matthew all our "stuff" was evenly distributed between our 3 extra bedrooms and their closets. After we decided which room was to be the nursery we had to do a major reshuffle of furniture and the other items to get that room and it's closet empty. Ladies who have been pregnant will understand when I say I have never known exhaustion until I got pregnant. I had NO idea how much energy it takes to grow a baby! So as we were reshuffling things I didn't have the patience to organize it all and ended up just shoving everything into the 2 remaining closets.

Now that Matthew is a year and a half I have decided it's time to bite the bullet and dive in to my closets. I have purposely not looked in them too much because it stresses me out to see everything in them. I wanted our guest bedroom closet to be empty except for the infant swing, infant car seat, and a few toys Matthew has outgrown. So that meant everything that was in that closet needed to come out and go somewhere else. Plus I needed to reorganize the study closet. Our study is a computer room, guest room, and scrapbook room rolled into one. In the closet I had 3 different, very large, cardboard boxes with memorabilia in them (high school items, college items, and wedding/married life items) to use with my scrapbooks. I have saved EVERYTHING! I have movie ticket stubs from 12 years ago, sorority newsletters from my college years, friends wedding invites and their baby shower invitations/announcements. It was my plan to include all these things in my future scrapbooks. However, I have come to the sad realization that I just don't have enough time to make extensive scrapbooks like I would have liked. So instead of keeping the boxes in the closet and having them take up much needed space, I went through them all and condensed them into 2 quite smaller plastic tubs. I could probably put all the things I have in both tubs in one of the cardboard boxes and still have some room left over in the box. I wish I would have taken a before and after picture to show you just how large the boxes were. But anyway, I'm extremely proud of myself for throwing stuff away, it was not an easy task!!

But that leads me to the second part of my title. As I was cleaning out the High School box I ran across pictures from a youth group mission trip to Maine. One afternoon during our free/fun day we went on a whale watch and as the boat was making its way back to the shore a bunch of us gathered on the top deck to hang out. A few people fell asleep and others of us just relaxed with the swaying of the boat. I like this picture because no one is posing, it's just a still shot of everyone hanging out. As I looked at it I focused on individual people and started to reminisce about different things that happened on that trip or fun memories from other events. But then I started thinking about all our lives since we have "graduated" from the youth group. One girl lost her brother in a car accident, one guys wife has had several miscarriages and finally was able to have a baby girl, another girl has had many miscarriages as well. A friend of mine was killed in a car accident during my sophomore year of college, it was her freshman year. And just recently one guy has battled cancer. As I think of all these things I can't help but feel extremely blessed by the life God has provided me. Sure, my life has had it's road bumps and detours, but nothing compared to what some of my other friends have experienced! The annoyances I am experiencing that I once thought were big don't seem that bad after all. I am thankful for this reminder!!