God stirred me YET AGAIN today to finish writing this entry. I started writing about my overstuffed-life back in August of 2021. Yes…I did a double take when, in February of this year, I checked the date on the original Word file saved on my computer. I began this writing even before I started the On-Parallel Paths website. It feels like God’s timing validates all that you will read below.  Since Bruce and I have completed our two-month visit to the Dominican Republic (DR) four months ago now!!!! and I started revising the 2021 entry while I was there in the DR five months ago. It seems prophetic to our present lives so along with the original text that I wrote in regular font, I’ve added underlined sections in italics to provide you with an updated version. Bless you!!! for continuing with me on this on-parallel paths journey by reading this quadruple edition.

What does over-stuffed mean and what does it look like? Well, you’ll get several clear examples if you take a glance at my purse, calendar, drawers, closets, cell phone wallet, desk, and even recipe file box. Yes, I still have that precious strawberry print recipe box that my Tri-Delta sorority sister Martha “Teal” gave me at a bridal shower that she and her mom graciously hosted for me over 40 years ago).

When I pause to think about it, literally everything in my life has felt overstuffed for decades. Jammed so totally full that whatever the “item” is… it has limited room for anything else… and therefore, often things “fall out.”

That’s why I buy Dollar Tree sunglasses, because they tend fall out of my small handbags and break. I can’t get too upset when the lens pops out or the earpiece loses its pin. If that happens, I’ll balance them on my nose while driving to the store to buy another pair for a dollar ($ 1.25 now.) Why, you may ask, don’t I buy and use bigger purses? Well, I have tried a bigger purse, but it quickly became over-stuffed and I can’t find anything I was looking for in it! 

I think I try to blame (eye roll) this tendency on my Scottish/Germany heritage, “waste not want not.”

Yes, for all my adult life my calendar has been so full that I often just barely make it to scheduled events and appointments on time. I hate being late and I equally don’t like arriving too early and wasting time waiting around. So, I take-on that “just one more” chore before I leave the home or run “just one more” errand on my way across town. Yes, I am guilty. I over-commit with activities and people that I really love. 

“Remember this—a farmer who plants only a few seeds will get a small crop. But the one who plants generously will get a generous crop.”

2 Corinthians 9:6 NLT

You might describe such a “full” life, with words like “rich”, “abundant”, “exciting”, “blessed”, or “stimulating.” You could also describe it using adjectives such as “frantic”, “disjointed”, “over-extended”, “exhausting”, “frustrating”, “striving”, and “anxiety producing.”  

I love spending time with my many friends and family. I love traveling around the world for work, meeting fascinating people, and going to fascinating places with my overstuffed suitcase. I love trying new recipes by having friends over for a meal. I love to go to the grocery store, particularly an international one, to browse through the shelves for new things to try to replicate flavors I have enjoyed. I love having new pottery and serving dishes to put all the yummy things in them that I make. There is something about “functional art” that I just love – especially when I know the artist.  So, I have tried to make the most of all that I love.

I love that my grandmother, Florine Harper Gilliland, painted on China and canvas and needle pointed dozens of beautiful pillows and even the Backgammon game board that sits in our family room. I love the creativity of my Iowa contemplative friend Susan D-M, who is a calligrapher and poet, or our Wisconsin artist friend, Mick M, who throws gorgeous pottery and blessed us with three mugs to enjoy a beverage with our son Will during his cancer journey and then the “Good-Will” bowl he gave us 18 months later in Will’s memory.

I love that my elementary school friend, Lori L, embroiders linens and makes lovely paper notecards, or my Northern Ireland friend, Jill Mc, paints/draws prophetic pictures/messages. I love my Florida photographer friend, Jill C who blessed me with photos and words of prayer most days of Will’s cancer journey, and my Greek/UK banker and painter (clouds) friend, Jim G, who now lives in Seminole, FL, and I can’t forget my long-time family friend from Greenville, Lynn G, who is also a painter (Retired beach ladies). I love that my friends Tracy and Dan G are accomplished professional musicians, composers and conductors and that Tracy also is a published Western Romance writer… oh so many creative friends. The list could go on. So, you guessed it, I now have my guest bathroom, numerous walls, the China buffet, shelves, and cabinets overflowing with lovely and meaningful things.  Would I give up any of it that I love?  Not unless I absolutely have to… and it appears that this next stage of life is encouraging me to do some prioritizing so that I don’t have to.

When a dear friend, Victor H., from all the way back to high school days, wrote and asked me just this week… “What are three things you are thinking about?“… I stopped to consider his question and realized that I didn’t know what I was thinking. 

I hadn’t slowed down in quite a while. I couldn’t remember when the last time was that I stopped to intentionally “think”, vs. just react/survive what was going on in my life. Victor’s question was a wakeup call, or rather an awakening. I am pretty sure that an abundance of grief is why this is the case. But, I’ve recommitted to “setting aside” time to be quiet, “think”, pray, and, journal… to process all the “fullness” of my life. 

https://youtu.be/ZrpTTtvrRfI     

I don’t mean it to sound like I am totally oblivious to my life and what is going on. I have really worked hard to live an active and intentional life. And I have done a lot of thinking along with “doing” over the past two years. I praise God that our son Will along with both my Dad and Mom are now each healed and living in eternity and by God’s  grace and with the support of so many dear friends and family members, I am still functioning.  I know that without the Lord, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed for even one day out of the past approximately 305 days. (You can add another 710+ days to this number, to record the faithfulness of God to keep me going.)

Yeah, my life has been overstuffed for six decades… from a childhood filled with the dynamics of being in a busy family of six…when I studied hard to make up for the natural academic abilities I wasn’t blessed with. I took ballet and either piano/guitar/clarinet music lessons, participated in church activities, kept active on the school swim team and student government, worked part-time jobs, and held leadership roles in organizations. I attended full-time graduate school and held down a part-time job as a newly married woman. I’ve been able to build a successful 40+-year financial banking/consulting career, operating as a part-time children’s chauffeur service, volunteering for numerous church and community initiatives, all while striving to maintain a “healthy functioning” pastor’s family… until now. I feel I just don’t want to spin that over-stuffed plate anymore.

(Particularly, now that I have lost Will, my Dad and my Mom, I have taken some time to ponder “What now?.)  “Who am I now?”  “Is what I do, who I am, Lord?”, “How does my life demonstrate who I am?”  My life has been so overstuffed that my brain has too many questions to ask, and I have lost whatever view I had to the core/heart/bottom-line of who I am…

https://youtu.be/sIaT8Jl2zpI

So, while on my DR “sabbatical” I set side all my communications and responsibilities and spent time with the One who created me.  I asked God these questions. I heard his words paraphrased from scripture that I was reading… “You are My child, and you are loved. To be able to fully embrace MY LOVE,  you need to de-stuff your life and make more room for Me… dwell with Me as you liked to dwell with Will during his cancer journey.”  “Love on Me, since you miss loving on Will. Search for Me with all your heart…and you will find Me…and in finding Me you will find our life.”

The Lord says in the scripture: 

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”Mathew 6:25

So, “I apologize Lord, for overstuffing my life. I need your help to start to unstuff… declutter… purge… simplify… reorganize… my life… so that I can find the life you desire for me.” Never would I have thought when I wrote that and prayed that in 2021, that God would take me all the way to the DR for two months, to work in the camp kitchen with a group of amazing servants and spend time walking by myself up and down dusty hills, so that I could hear Him… but in the past He has had to audibly speak to me to get my attention. If I haven’t already shared with you, remind me to tell you my Big Lots parking lot story. Yes, I guess I am slow to listen and take action sometimes. .

The best way that I have been able to relate to the process and benefits of decluttering, purging, and reorganizing has been the work I’ve done in the past six months (23 months, now) since my dad passed. With my sisters and our spouses, we have sorted out my parents 4,000 sq/ft. home, packed with 63 years of their memories and numerous items that belonged to my grandparents and “great somebody.”  God has used this task to raise my awareness about the state of my own home. Bruce and I have moved lots of times in our 39 years of married life (Now we will celebrate 41 years this week back here in the DR) but even so, we have collected a lot of things… some of them are Will’s that we never imagined coming back to us in our lifetime and some are from my parents’ home. So, the sorting and decision making isn’t new to me. However, this season of sorting and purging of Will’s things, my parents’ things, and those from each of their parents has been a much more extensive and emotionally difficult experience.

Every day for weeks at a time, my sisters and I went through Gilliland/Morgan family “treasures”. This required a dozen texts or phone calls a day to family members with direct questions of interest and hundreds of small decisions and considerations. It was physically and mentally exhausting to declutter and reorganize their things. 

What to keep?   

What to throw away? 

What to give away?  

What to sell?… Would anyone actually buy this… “stuff”?  

After our estate unstuffing process, you should have seen the results of the sorting and cleaning that we did! The folk’s home was brighter and the open rooms welcoming. The clean simplicity of no clutter allowed for a vision of the home’s potential by a new owner. It was a blank slate ready for someone to put their mark on it. The best part for me is the joy of seeing our son’s and my folk’s “treasures” repurposed into my sister’s, daughter’s, niece’s, friend’s and in my home. There has been a healing comfort to see their lives “live on” in their special possessions.

But how many special possessions can one home hold? 

How much importance have I put on those “things” and activities in my life that are just cluttering up my space and my time? 

Which of these “things” are really life giving?  

During the months of February and March in the DR I found that our two room + tiny bath space was more than sufficient to feel contented. The basic roof over our head, the queen-sized bed (which is large compared to the typical DR double-size one that most families here have) with warm blankets for sleep, an inside flush toilet, hot water,  plastic table, chairs, and two sets of dinnerware for meals, and basic fresh foods…were more than sufficient. There is no doubt that I like nice things and there isn’t a thing wrong with that. But “the simpler the better” is beginning to hold more and more attraction for me. 

https://youtu.be/A0IrWDtaoSA

So, likewise, I am anticipating that the unstuffing process for my life will be time consuming and challenging but a blessing. I want to focus on a functional new-life-layout that is simplified… leaving lots of room for focusing on the things of eternal value… that God has me to focus on. (Remember I wrote that in August of 2021 long before the two month trip to the DR was even thought of.

During the 47+ months since I started pondering my overstuffed life, I had done very little about it. Sure, due to COVID and the graciousness of the consulting company I work for I was allowed to reduce my workload during my times of care-giving and immediate grief, plus the fact that at the time banks weren’t spending much money on training their workers, But, otherwise I hadn’t made any changes and Bruce was actually busier than he had ever been with picking up a part-time pastor responsibility along with his full-time missions role with Young Life, International. 

(Bruce and I were beginning to see these thoughts/prayers/ramblings coming to be realities that we needed to make some decisions about.

The momentum changed only three days after we arrived in the DR in February.  Our Sarasota HOA (Home owner’s Association) board sent out an email stating that they were going to discuss us (no, they wouldn’t wait for us to return in two months to do that) for two reasons; first that our RV periodically visited our driveway (always for less time than the community rules allowed) so that we could  clean and prep it to be rented out or for our personal travel (a recent meeting clarified that they objected to the fact that we rented the RV, not that it was in the driveway,) and secondly that we had friends stay in our home to cat sit our grand-cat, Lulu, water the plants and keep an eye out on things when we were in the DR…(they actually objected that I “informed” them about the friends that were coming and didn’t “ask for their approval.”) 

I think it curious that I sent the letter a week before we left for the DR and nobody replied to us about needing to rephrase the letter as a request before we left. (After the fact when rereading our by-laws, we found that we were required to notify them not ask for permission.) So what was that HOA stuff all about?

Apparently God got tired of waiting for us to make changes, so He did it for us, Back in 2021 the last line I wrote in the entry was..

“De-stuffing will provide me with space and time for focusing on Him, His love, His healing power, His hope, His direction for my life… That’s the kind of life I want!”

https://youtu.be/Q9ZkmMH7Ipk 

To this point I hadn’t done anything different about making that kind of life happen. So, in March and April of this year, Bruce and I talked and prayed about things for weeks and decided that we didn’t want to remain living in that community with “friends” who would treat others this way. We decided it would be simpler and more peaceful for us to live our lives in a home that wasn’t under the scrutiny of controlling neighbors and that was closer to our daughter and her family. We figured that it would be a huge time saver to be with them when we aren’t out of town or out of the country, either visiting extended family and completing ministry related travel. We want to build more memories with Kate’s family while we are able. 

It has been very hard to not hold a grudge against our HOA. We loved living in Sarasota and being near dear friends and Bruce’s dad and his wife.

But as the scriptures says:

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” 

Genesis 5:20

So, between work assignments and medical appointments, we began in earnest to do decluttering (or “editing” as our Real Estate agent called it) to get our home ready to be listed for sale.  Some of the hardest de-cluttering was just a few weeks ago when I was cleaning out our attic and I came across a tub of Will’s photos and school work from his first through third grade years that hadn’t made it into a scrapbook yet, along with a couple pair of  Will’s work shoes and belts, six monogramed doctor’s white coats, and two boxes of formal China that Bruce’s mom wanted Will to have when he married.)

Beyond the physical decluttering, I added to my spiritual decluttering a list prayers for to God to give me a large “power blast of forgiveness” toward my literal neighbors and the administrators at Will’s residency hospital program, who failed him by not ensuring their young doctors obtained the medical care and support that they needed. I know I need to love them all and leave behind this heavy season of grief and pain for something better.

https://youtu.be/PsAcN8p8EV4  

We listed and sold our Sarasota home before the end of June ( I won’t go into the details of the piles we had to set aside for the DR, and ones for the PODS long-term storage and what we would need to go into RV for the next 6-9 months)…Which means we are now nomads, so to speak… living in our RV in the Green Cove Springs, FL area, visiting our missions home base in the DR (30 minutes from Young Life’s Camp and an hour the other direction to Santiago’s airport in the mountain village called Buena Vista), and planning some fall RV traveling around the US to attend meetings and see longtime friends and family.

We would treasure your prayers and encouragement for patience, wisdom, and joy during the next months while we continue to work in our respective vocations and begin the process to build a maintenance-free home that will be our US home base… on a lot two doors down from our daughter Kate and her family!! Here is our recently cleared lot and mailbox! God is good and faithful. We pray we can be, too.

I am sure that in this next part of the journey God will have many new learnings that He will prompt me share.

Thanks for waiting so long with me to share this message…Blessings until we journey again together. Keep well.)

https://youtu.be/4_2aX_i4qpM