The things we carry with us

At work there are 7 things I always carry with me: gloves, keys, tape measure, ID badge, walkie talkie, safety glasses and utility tool. These things allow me to take care of a lot of tasks without having to spend an excessive amount of time running back and forth from one corner of the museum to the other. Each thing I carry makes my job easier in one way or another without putting much extra burden on myself in the form of weight. But, ther comes a point when adding one more thing becomes counterproductive. I often need a cordless drill, but there are periods where I can go a week without using one. If I carried that with me all the time it would prevent me from carrying a box of material from one place to another because I would only have one hand free. I would have to make an extra trip to come back for my drill or balance it precariously on top.

I was thinking about this mostly because I am in the process of moving. This process would be incredibly efficient if everything I own would fit into a single car load and I could just drive off after it all got packed up. This is not the case, however. So far I've taken about four full loads and there are still another two remaining. It has made me think about shaving down the number of things I carry with me. The reason I think we accumulate so much is because when we get something new we don't get rid of something else to compensate because we might need it sometime later. The truth is the old thing becomes outdated and underused over time and when we find it in the closet a year later it just gets thrown out. I think when we get something dnew it should be a requirement to get rid of something else. This will make us thing twice about the new shirt that will make us choose one of our old favorites to turn into a rag. Or it will allow us to give away the old lawn mower while we still can remember all the quirks of how to get it started so we can explain them to the new owner. Do we really need back ups for everything? Isn't that what we have neighbors for?

The truth is I don't know my neighbors. If I asked to borrow a shovel to clean off my sidewalk I don't know what kind of response I would get. Creating a community mentality is one of the themes of Christ's parables and the early church. He requires the rich young man to sell all his possessions in order to follow him so there aren't any distractions and so he relies on others (God's provision) and not himself for all his needs.

This coming summer there will be a community of nearly 200 cyclists at any given time. Each day it's likely that a few people will blow a tire or require some form of first aid. Knowing this I think we need to resist the urge to individually go out and buy everything we might need on the road. Doing this would add a lot of weight to each cyclist's load and over the course of a few thousand miles and some steep inclines would put a lot of extra stress on our joints. What we should try to do is not go it alone, but instead give each member of the body one thing to carry, one specific purpose and rely on each other to carry out our purposes. There will be many different groups riding different speeds, some may have to ride a little slower than they might like and others a little faster to stay in their group, but among each group we can work together to make things easier.