Half a Towel/Whole Heart

It was time to get breakfast on the table. Time was at a premium before church and I needed to get with it. All I needed to finish up was a clean kitchen towel.

Wondering what all my rummaging was about, Dennis queried from his chair in the living room, “What are you looking for?”

“My other kitchen towel,” I answered. I had some with a hodge podge of decorative motifs, but only two that I valued highly. Since fruit was my kitchen decor's theme, I had been thrilled to find two nice kitchen towels sporting embroidered fruit. With their luxurious thickness, I loved, loved, loved those towels. The dirty one needed

replacing, but where was the other one?

Exasperated with my focus on the towel and not his hungry tummy, Dennis finally asked, “What did it look like?”

I gave a brief description and Dennis turned a decidedly pasty white. “Did it look like this and this?” he asked.

After my nodding in the affirmative, he gathered up his courage to confess, “It sounds like the rag I cut in two to tie up our new mango tree.”

I looked out into our back yard. Sure enough, the breeze was flapping a pale green “rag” around the mango tree and the support to which Dennis had tied it.

Long story short—the kitchen towel laundry basket was next to the rag pile basket. Therein lay the fault of the destruction of my towel, and it was totally mine. Due to storage space being at a premium, I had placed those two baskets side by side. I was the guilty party who had carelessly thrown the dirty towel into the wrong basket. Dennis was totally innocent in this destruction of the towel I loved—after all, it had been thrown into the rag pile basket. How was he to know it hadn’t been meant to go there? But it didn't keep him from feeling guilty for doing something that hurt me.

As tears began to course down my cheeks, I made a belated note to myself to separate those two laundry baskets. But the damage was done. My towel was history.

Breakfast was fixed to the tune of my hiccuping sobs.

Now, looking back, I can laugh at the ridiculousness of my reaction. For crying out loud, it was just a kitchen towel. So what if it’s hard to find towels with fruit motifs. So what if fluffy kitchen towels are as rare as hen’s teeth. The towel was just a thing, a possession that I would leave behind when I went to that great big kitchen in the sky (at least, I hope the Lord lets me cook there, I do enjoy it so much).

A few years back I had lamented to a colleague about all the stuff I had been forced to do away with in our move to another city for Dennis’s work.

“Janine,” my friend said, “you just said it—it’s stuff. Just possessions that are for our use here in this world. They are transitory and shouldn’t have a hold on us. Our treasure should be in heavenly things.”

I had agreed with my friend, but obviously the lesson hadn’t “taken.” Now I thanked God for my friend’s wise words and for a loss that has helped me loosen my fingers a little more on earthly stuff. She was so right. That’s all it is—stuff. In God’s economy, minimalism is the way to go.

Lord, help us focus on what really matters. Things in this life—they come and go. And for sure we can’t take them with us. But You? Your love? Your mercy? Your grace? Your forgiveness? Those are the true treasures in life. Help us hold them close to the vest and treasure them for the incomparable wonder they are.

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:19-21).