Just thinking

This past week I needed to have my Children’s Ministry resource room moved. Let me describe one of the three rooms we occupied. In this room we had 4 bakers carts filled (overflowing actually) then 2 other shelving units just as big and full. Not so bad?  Not so… we also have a small clothing rack for costumes that was not holding up due to the abundance of costumes. Did I mention the 6 trashcans full of props?  And any other useable space filled with props. This room was full but not horribly messy just what I would say manageably disorganized.  I’m not the greatest organizer but this needed done and I decided that with this move would come new fresh organization.

After some convincing (me being convince that they could handle the move) one of our families that supports my ministry a ton took on the initial move. They move everything to one room across the church to be sorted. This room was close to where the new resource room would be. Everything was moved in one night. But if I thought I had a mess before WOW! It was an understatement now. No fault of anyone person. The realization that we had more than we needed was in my face. This was so cluttered that I was not even able to make the piles to sort. After moving some things around and quick purging and a trip to Wal-Mart for storage containers. I was able to start. It seemed to take hours but with encouragement from staff and leaders I moved forward. I made a toss pile, a keep pile, and a long-term storage pile. The next day I had tons of help packing, sorting, organizing, and labeling. You got to love the Dymo labeler!

With in one week we moved and condensed 3 areas that we considered to be all our resources down to 2 rooms the size of the one original room. Everything is labeled and easily attainable to those who need it for their ministry on the weekend.

Going forward we will have a request sheet and supply boxes that will be filled with the supplies requested. Ready to be pick up by the date needed. Then after the services are over the boxes will be due back to the room for clean up and redistribution and inventory.  Hopefully this will minimize the supply scatter and disorganization.

But wow what a task! Thanks to everyone who but their time and sweat and tears into this project!

I was thinking sometimes this is just like our lives. We collect and hold on to things over the years. It could be it possessions or habits or even priorities. Whatever it is we need to take time to step back and clean out the resources room of our lives. Some we need to just trash, others we need to hand over to another person to handle. Then you have some you want to keep ready to use at any moment. Yet, those hard ones we so want to cling to we need to turn over to God, to help us put them into the right area. I can’t help but think of the prayer of Jonah 2:7-8: “Those who cling to worthless idols 
 turn away from God’s love for them.”

We need to organize our lives and reprioritize. So the things that God has given us to use to give Him glory we can tap into quickly and easily with out being tripped up but junk clogging up our lives. So don’t wait start to clean out the clutter!