‘Just things’

It was an ordinary Saturday evening in late April. My wife, Tammy and I were in the last few minutes of watching a TV movie and, during a commercial break, I sent a quick text to my sister, Koreen, who lives in Illinois. Earlier in the day, the two of us had been discussing by text a short story I had just written and I was wondering if she had further thoughts about it. The message that came back a few seconds later was chilling and completely unexpected.
“Well...” she wrote, “you can let the brothers know our house just burned.” 
There was little more by way of explanation, except to say they had been out for the evening and were just getting home.
As she had requested, I quickly forwarded her text off to our two brothers and then immediately placed a call to her cell phone. 
Her voice on the other end of the line sounded more chipper than I had expected under the circumstances but she told me that she and her husband, Dennis, were standing outside in the chill evening air watching their house burn as firefighters were breaking out the new windows they had only recently installed. We would later learn that the blaze, which started while they were 30 minutes away watching a play, had burned their two-story addition to the ground and had reduced the older part of the structure to a blackened and burned out shell. Everything was gone — all the pictures, family heirlooms, handmade quilts, wedding china, books, files, all their cherished possessions, all of it…gone. 
For the next few minutes I simply listened as she told the timeline of their personal disaster and described the scene as best she could. Through years of ministering to people in times of crisis I knew better than to try to offer comforting words in that tender moment, because even though they are ultimately true, platitudes spoken in the wrong moment can often seem insensitive and do more harm than good. Therefore, near the end of the brief call, I was glad to hear my sister say through the tears in voice, “After all, it’s all just things, right?”
It’s true, the best things in life are not “things” at all. It’s our relationships with other people and our Creator that bring us the greatest joys in life. However, even when we understand that at a heart level, we still love our things and have a hard time letting go of them. Many items, such as family heirlooms are irreplaceable because of their sentimental value and the memories tied to them, but for many of us, it doesn’t take much to assign special value to an object. 
Often we hold on to things that don’t even have a particular memory tied to them on the pretext that they are “too good to throw away” or “we might need them someday.” So we keep them and work around them and move them from place to place in big trucks and we pay out good money to store them. Would it surprise you to know that Americans spend $39 billion a year to rent storage units in which to store stuff they’ll probably never use?  
In the wake of my sister’s loss, I thought about another Koreen I know who also lost her home and valued possessions in a fire a few years ago. My high school classmate, who shares the same first name with my sister and was actually named after her as our parents were long-time friends, was living in California in 2017 when her family’s home was destroyed in the Thomas Wildfire north of L.A. in Ventura County. They moved to Ft. Collins, Colo. the next year. 
In chatting online with the other Koreen after my sister’s fire she could completely identify with the shock and the grieving that takes place after such a loss. She noted that it takes time to process an event like that and said the residual effects can last for years. 
“There will be things months, years down the road that she will look for, only to remember that they are no more...but also that they are just things,” she said.
There it was again from someone else who had suffered a devastating fire and the loss of prized possessions — “just things.” 
In subsequent talks with my sister, she has reaffirmed her statement made the night of the fire and remains at peace with her loss, desiring only for God to get the glory in all things. In fact, she reported that Dennis has “shed many more tears over people’s response than (because of) the tragedy itself.”
These discussions have reminded me of the words of Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch woman who lost her family and virtually everything else in the Nazi concentration camps of WWII. In her many public appearances after the publication of her book “The Hiding Place,” she would often say, “Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.”
The implication of that statement is that God has the right to take away those things anyway, so hold onto the things loosely but hold tightly to Him. 
Christ Himself gave this very admonishment when he said “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15)
Instead, He said “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
In life, in crushing loss and in eternity, it all comes down to where your heart is. 
RON BURTZ can be reached at newsregister@hamilton.net