The Joy of Stuff (Re-thinking the Cult of Tidying Up)

I finally have a dream home. Oh, it’s the same house; it’s just been tidied. In preparation for selling up and moving out, I spent last week banishing clutter to the Rescue Mission donation center and furniture to the Storage Max unit.

Candles? Gone. Cookbooks? Gone. Chairs? Gone.

My house is now a gleaming paradise of open space. A beautiful temple to downsized, intentional, edited, minimal living.

De-cluttering has never been more trendy, of course. Following a decade of economic down-turning and down-sizing, this is the year of Marie Kondo’s global bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Her radical clean-sweep method is so popular it has become a verb, as in “I Kondoed my closet," and Kondo's central tenant is evaluating each possession with the simple question: “Does it spark joy?”

My dented crock pot with its melted lid-knob (from the time I mistakenly stuck it in the oven) does not “spark joy.” It takes up a perfectly good kitchen shelf, and, when I get it out, it hogs an entire expanse of spotless countertop.

My cups and glasses don’t really “spark joy” either. If you open my cabinets, you are likely to be hit on the head by a tumbling plastic tumbler—bearing a faded slogan for Dickey’s BBQ or Broad Street Bakery. Toddler sippy cups perch next to a leaning tower of plastic polka-dot plates. Nope. No joy here.

In the bathroom closets, the extra sets of towels and sheets are hopelessly joyless. The stock of travel-sized toiletries, ditto. Stacks of napkins, piles of tablecloths, bread baskets, serving platters, two sets of flatware, three sets of dishes. Kondo, help me!

But now, in preparation for the  HGTV-trained eyes of potential buyers, my house has officially been Kondoed.

In some ways, I love it.

There’s a certain Pharisaic appeal to tidying up. Anyone who comes to my house can immediately see how virtuous I am. No hint of hoarding here. No extra possessions purchased on a whim and a debit card. No disorganization or lack of control in this home. Obviously, I have got this life thing figured out. Why doesn’t everyone?

(Storage unit, you say? What storage unit?)

And there’s also a certain selfishness. (Kondo reports that one of her clients jettisoned her husband because he didn’t meet the joy-sparking criteria.) Sans chairs and cookbooks and candles and crock-pot, sans towels and toiletries and tablecloths, my home is perfect for exactly one person: me.

But my house is not a show-place, nor is it a personal retreat. It an arena for God’s glory and a factory for his kingdom. My house is a place of dirty-work, of washing the dusty feet of weary pilgrims. It's a refuge for grace-redeemed sinners, who sometimes melt the crock-pot lids. It's a place to welcome little ones, Lego bricks and plastic cups and all. And it’s a storehouse for hospitality (Rom. 12:13, 1 Pet. 4:9), where impoverished souls can find the riches of Christ.

So if that means I need a few more chairs cluttering the corners, and a few more towels filling the closets--if that means I own some more stuff in order to welcome the least of these--well, maybe those things do spark joy after all.