The Dangerous Lure of Stuff
By Steve Orton

I suppose there are thousands of older couples across Mormondom who are just like my wife and me. We are downsizing. We have lived in our home for 22 years and raised seven children there. They are all gone now — gone off to live their own lives and to raise their own families. Our house is filled with wonderful memories, but it is also filled with stuff.

It has taken us 45 years of marriage to accumulate all the trappings of family life. When we first started out it was with a few chairs, a mattress, an old kitchen table, and cardboard moving boxes for end tables. It has taken us all these years to acquire the beds, lamps, furniture and decorations that now fill our rooms. It fact, it was only recently that we bought the last few remaining pieces intended to complete the decoration of our home.

But now all that must be reversed. Some of the rooms now sit unused. The air conditioning vents have been closed to divert air to the smaller set of rooms we now occupy. The yard is too big and too hard to take care of. Every day could be spent mowing, trimming, weeding and grooming the yard, and while there is pleasure in seeing a flower garden bloom we are also aware of the achy joints it takes to get there.

There is an additional factor at work here. We have been avid readers of Laurie Sowby’s excellent articles in Meridian about the senior mission that she and her husband served in Chile. We realize this is a path we want to follow, but wonder what to do with the house.

All our children have their own homes, and we are reluctant to rent to strangers. And unlike the situation for senior missionaries coming from the Wasatch Front, where all the neighbors are in the same ward and can take care of a fellow member’s vacant house, our nearest Mormon neighbors are miles away.

So downsizing into a condo or apartment would seem to fulfill two purposes: lessen the burden of taking care of the house and yard and free us up to lock the condo door for a year or two to go on a mission.

Emotional Chore

But we have so much stuff, and getting rid of some of it is going to be more than just a logistical challenge; it is going to be an emotional chore. For example, our dining room table is much too big for the condos we have our eyes on and will need to go to a new home.

But there are many fond memories attached to this table. It was purchased at great sacrifice during the days of our poverty and has hosted numerous Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and other family parties. No “for-sale” ad in the newspaper can convey its true worth, and no yard-sale buyer can value it as much as we have.

The other day I finished winterizing a brand-new lawnmower I purchased at the beginning of the season. It is bright red, new and shiny, and it works better than any lawnmower I ever owned. After years of making due with used or bottom-of-the-line lawnmowers I finally have the one I have waited years to get. But it will not be needed in our new place.

Similarly, there are many other things around the house we have waited years to get and now must leave: a new stove, a new heat pump, and so on. With these and similar upgrades we are the most comfortable we have ever been, but if we are to follow this new course we must walk away from much of it.

It is tempting at times to call the whole thing off and settle back into the comfortable, the familiar, the feathered-nest of our material possessions. Our stuff.

Ancient Problem

This reminds me of a thought offered by Dr. S. Michael Wilcox about the children of Israel coming out of Egypt. When they began to face the hardships of the Sinai desert they remembered what they had back in Egypt and lamented,

Though they had just escaped 400 years of slavery and toil, many would have preferred to be back in Egypt among their possessions. They had not the faith to realize that within a generation’s time they would start to become the great nation God had promised Abraham they could be. Their attachment to their material possessions and familiar gods nearly derailed the whole enterprise during the golden calf incident. (See Exodus 32)

President Spencer W. Kimball warned about the danger of too much attachment to material things. In this year’s Teachings of the Presidents of the Church he is quoted as saying,

We [can] see many parallels between the ancient worship of graven images and behavioral patterns in our own experience ... Modern idols or false gods can take such forms as clothes, homes, businesses, machines, automobiles, pleasure boats, and numerous other material deflectors from the path of godhood.

Physical Burden

In addition to the potential for our material possessions being a spiritual detraction, they can become a physical burden. Our pioneer ancestors were often reminded of this as they set out on their trek westward. They had to downsize drastically.

Those leaving from Nauvoo were no doubt tempted to bring as much with them as a wagon could hold in order to reestablish their lives in the West as comfortably as possible. But after the muddy trails in Iowa or the rocky ridges in Wyoming, Grandma’s prized piano in the back of the wagon was no longer an asset; it was a liability. Soon both the Mormon and Oregon trails were littered with stuff that once was valuable and now was not.

Our downsizing effort has taken somewhat the same turn. As we sort through all our stuff to determine what we will take with us, what will go to the yard sale, and what will end up at the Goodwill, we have come to realize how much energy we are expending tending to our stuff. This is truly a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Although our possessions have not become “false gods,” all of a sudden they have become a burden. We have to remind ourselves that it is just stuff — to be used wisely as tools to aid our lives when warranted and disposed of when no longer supporting our eternal goals.

Certainly I would never want it said of me that I did not go on a senior mission because I liked my shiny, new red lawnmower more.