In the opening scene of the most recent Spiderman movie,
Peter Parker is playing hide and seek with his parents. It’s nighttime. The house seems huge and foreboding, empty
and dark. Peter enters his father’s
office and finds it a wreck. Someone has
been in the house, looking for something.
When I was a kid, I remember not liking hide and seek very
much. I didn’t mind hiding. I still remember fooling my dad by hiding in
between the shower curtain and liner, so that when he pulled back the curtain,
thinking I was in the tub, I was still hidden.
But I never liked the “seeking.” It caused me a great deal of anxiety both
because I was afraid that whoever was hiding would jump out at me and because I
was afraid that I would overlook them even when they were hiding in the most
obvious place.
I don’t play hide and seek anymore, but like most people,
the older I get, the more I find myself misplacing things and turning the house
upside down in order to find whatever it is I’m looking for.
Last January, I drove up to Daytona to buy a car. I brought the title of my old car with me,
sticking it in my bag. In the end, I
left Daytona in the same car I came there in, unable to make a deal. When I got home, I put my bag on my desk
chair and forgot about it until a few days later when I came down with one of
my crippling fevers and wound up in the emergency room. Before I left for the E.R., I emptied my bag,
including the title for the car and stuffed the bag with things I might need
for an overnight stay at the hospital.
That was the last time I saw the title.
Now I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to papers. I hate clutter and I’m good with throwing
away most everything else, but for some reason, every piece of paper seems
important to me, so I have boxes and boxes of papers. So when I lost the title, I knew it was some
place in the house. I knew I hadn’t
thrown it away. But I looked in all the
obvious places and it had just vanished.
Until yesterday.
For whatever reason, I decided to sort through the watches I
had stored in my nightstand. I tend to
kill analog watches and clocks. Don’t
ask me how; it has nothing to do with the batteries, trust me. But if I buy an analog watch, it is almost guaranteed
to die within the year.
So I sat down in front of my nightstand and started making a
pile of watches that still worked (the digital ones and the self-winding ones)
and a pile that needed to be trashed.
And while I sat there, I said, well since I’m here, I might as well
straighten up the nook of the nightstand where I had shoved books and a few
loose papers.
Wouldn’t you know it?
When I made that decision yesterday to throw things out and straighten
things up, I found the title to the car, buried in the nook of my
nightstand. Never in a million years
would I have thought to look for it there.
I don’t even remember the last time I looked in that nook, but if you
had asked me, I would have said it’s been years. But it hadn’t been years, because there was
the title.
“Seek and ye shall find,” the Bible says.
But I had been seeking for months now and hadn’t found that dastardly
elusive title.
I’ve heard people say that when you stop looking for things
is usually when you find them, but I think something more was going on
here. It wasn’t that I had stopped
looking, it was that yesterday I made an effort to straighten up the house, to
clean up, to dust, to throw away things that no longer mattered or were of any
use to me.
And it was only when I made that effort that I found what I
was looking for.
Our lives are filled with clutter and not just in the
literal, physical sense. Our lives are
filled with emotional clutter. I have
said before we are emotional hoarders.
We allow our lives to become so tangled and messy that even though we
know that God has another path or direction for us, we can’t see it because we’re
lost and tied down by other things.
This morning was a church work day and I watched Donna
pulling vines off a tree and I saw other vines, dead and hanging from
pines. During previous work days, when
we have pulled vines off of trees, we have revealed treasures, oaks and other
trees stunted and craving the sun.
We have to make an effort in our lives to clear away the
vines, to let go of things, so that we can clear the path and find what we are
seeking.
It occurs to me that I’ve also lost the key to my filing
cabinet.
I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere in a part of the house I’ve
been neglecting. That’s one of my
goals. Which part of the house have I
been neglecting the most? When I find
that, I bet I’ll find the key.
Which part of your life have you been neglecting? Address that and you’ll find another key, a key
to open the doors you’ve been searching for.
