5 Steps to a Modern Day Miracle: The Hundred Year Sort

Forget the loaves and the fishes, that is yesterday’s miracle. Feeding five thousand seemed like child’s play when we looked at the mammoth task of sorting through the contents of our garage.  What we needed was a miracle TODAY, right now, immediately.  With or without loaves or fishes. Time to extend love . This sorting through belongings touches me deeply and hits on all the usual fears (fear of letting go, fear of not knowing what to do, fear of success if we actually do let go etc).  Just the word belonging lets you know why this might hurt, things belong to people, people belong to one another, I belong to God.  Belonging is in my DNA.  Only a miracle would get me through the day. Let me walk you through what miracles can look like today in five easy steps.

(1) Firstly, miracles begin with awareness.  I have had within me a growing awareness that finally sorting through our garage which houses stuff from four generations (five if you count the letters and china from my great grandparents) was an integral part of the peaceful transition of our daughter Savannah moving  when she is married.  The layers of stuff include my parents’, grandparents’, two daughter’s in constant college fluctuation and moving during their college years and of course our own layer of tools, BNI materials, promotional materials, garden pots, a healthy supply of luggage and enough linen and china to open a boutique.  Just writing about it rattles my cage even after our miracle yesterday.  How is it that we acquire such an amount of STUFF?!

Let’s all take a deep breath………

Our story begins one recent Sunday morning before 6am on the back porch.

Time to go within.

Tea in hand, I was meditating and asking for the awareness of peace, joy and spaciousness and had just settled in for this very thing.  Not five minutes later Savannah appears on the porch unable to fall back to sleep after waking early herself. Our conversation turned to her upcoming wedding shower and the obvious and now urgent need to create a space for the assembling of her possessions and future gifts in preparation for her move to join her fiance` when they marry at the end of the year.  It is great to have a date which means the fantasy of “some day we’ll clean out the garage” turns into the reality of “it must be done by August 22”. NOW has entered the picture and God is very much in the now.

After our conversation Savannah went back to bed, yet something she said echoed in my heart:  “I don’t really care what happens to the stuff I just want the process to be peaceful.”  That’s it!  We wanted peace above all.

(2) Secondly, space is made for the miracle by the desire for peace above any specific form or outcome.

Making space for the miracle.

Then I read our daily quote from one of my favorite authors and book, Tama Kieve’s  “A Year Without Fear” which highlighted amongst other things:

“The problem (the garage) is just the device to dislodge trapped potential.”

So now we had awareness and peace.  The next step is a personal step in the miracle narrative but somehow universal I think.  I thought, and actually said to my rather surprised husband:  “I don’t want to talk about the garage anymore, I just want to DO IT.”  As a confirmed conversationalist and ponderer this talking about things  counts as spiritual warm up for me no matter what the task at hand is.

That’s a lot of trapped potential!

(3)  Go ahead and take action.  Do it. Open the garage door, start the emptying process, set out sorting tables, fill the water bottles.  Above all let any judgment sit out the back in a lawn chair as it is not needed at this time.

(4) Notice as the miracle is unfolding not just after the fact.  Notice and enjoy the process. My husband didn’t bat an eye, bless him, when I said “I really feel like sorting the garage to make space for Savannah & Dan’s upcoming gifts”.  He said only “I want to take a shower first.”  Not a single look, word or slump that said “I’d rather sit here in my pj’s all day reading” or have my lungs removed rather than get in the garage today. So we went out to the garage, opened up the door and started the process.

In a couple of hours we had emptied a heap of stuff.  Then Savannah arrived on the scene and could barely believe her eyes.  She had been dreaming and in her dream a voice on a loud speaker said:

“Come out to the driveway.  Bring Everyone!”

She woke up, got up (no coffee, Redit, dressing) and came straight outside to witness the miracle already unfolding. (These kind of connected thoughts and somewhat prophetic dreams are not uncommon in our family.) She went inside to dress and prepare to join us as our next daughter, Madison, joined the process. She looked a little suspiciously at the seeming chaos and here is where the really miracle occurred.  Everyone kept working without directing the other. We just each followed our own intuition as to what to move next. No orders group. No presorting of who does what.  No judgments as to how hard it was or big a task or how much stuff there was.  And we discovered the real meaning to “being on the same page”:  We each followed our own guidance, together, on the same day.

I love an empty space!

(5) Acknowledge, receive and celebrate the miracle. This involved for us the continued positive reinforcement each one needed to throw away or give away each found item.  It meant we refrained from judging both ourselves and one another (or a past generation) for buying, keeping and storing everything from a can of string from the 1940’s to those crappy give away coffee mugs so many businesses love.  The miracle wasn’t so much the sorting as the gathering together in non judgment for a task at hand.  In that space, the miracle, be it feeding five thousand with a few fishes and a couple of loaves of bread or sorting through a hundred years of possessions, is inevitable.

We finished our day, 30 man hours but with eternity on our side.

Time to let go…

The garage was sorted.  Two SUV’s and a car were filled to the brim with donations for Goodwill and we have a pile of rubbish in bags just waiting to take their turn in the bins to be hauled off.  After our much needed showers and a Whole Foods pizza run by the girls we settled down to a celebratory dinner by candlelight complete with four lone Christmas Crackers found during our sort and a chilled bottle of Chardonnay.  After all, God never slouches on miracles, why should we slouch when we acknowledge them?

What modern day miracle do you need to acknowledge and celebrate?