I am not what I own....

I saw someone on campus the other day wearing a shirt that read “I am not what I own,“ and have been thinking about it ever since. Its just so easy to get caught up in our culture of what we own... to find my identity in the car i drive, where i live, and the computer I own (especially since I *love* Apple!) Seriously. How do you fight such thought patterns?

Jessica met an ASU student a couple weeks ago who told her that she lives out of a hammock. She said that she found herself so attached to her stuff that she wanted to make a radical lifestyle change just to make sure she could live without her possessions. So she condensed everything she needed down to a small box of items, and sleeps in a hammock in her friends back yard. That amazes me.

I was also thinking about all the people that I love who have struggled with eating disorders, and how hard it is to be a female in our culture that idolizes the thin and beautiful. There are so many expectations we have on ourselves, and we are continually analyzing and judging, both ourselves and each other. Which made me realize that just as “I am not what I own“ it is also true that:

I am not what you see.

Who we really are has so very little to do with what we can see in the physical. How cool would it be if we could actually see each others soul instead of our physical bodies?? Actually, if you could see mine, I think it would be an old, overweight, African American woman who loves to laugh and calls everyone “honey.“

robbed in the night...

The other night we were robbed.

We decided to grab a bite at IHOP Sunday night after just getting back from California. While we were inside, someone smashed our van window and heisted a cell phone and a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment (which were full of pictures of the girls at Disneyland and the beach).

I don't know if you've ever been robbed before, but your first reaction is this deep feeling of being violated (to the point that my youngest daughter started crying uncontrollably when she found out). But then I remembered how my sister reacted when she was robbed a couple years ago. I was surprised when she told me, "oh, its just stuff.... and I realized I don't want to be that attached to my stuff."

It was kind of ironic, because the last couple weeks I have been reading a lot about "the dark night of the soul." Which basically is this somewhat obscure/mysterious process in our spiritual journey (that we don't always understand when we are in the middle of it) where God liberates us from our attachments so we can be free to live our true nature--which is Love.

There are so many beautiful thoughts connected to that idea, but I'll have to save that for another day. I do love the idea of being free, though. And it feels good to know that I can never be robbed of the important things in life (our relationships with God and each other). Everything else, I will hold loosely.