My friend Mary and I went for an early morning walk the other day. During our weekly walks, we take turns talking about life in an honest, here’s-what’s-going-on-with-me kind of way.
Mary invited me to go first, so after discussing my latest ups and downs, I yielded the, um, sidewalk to Mary.
As we neared the end of our walk, Mary summed up her thoughts by saying, “I don’t know how to deal with all this, so I stuff it in the junk drawer in the back of my mind and move on.”
I had no easy answer for what Mary was struggling with. I hugged her because sometimes all you can do for a friend is let them know you care and that you’re praying for them.
Mary’s concept of a mental junk drawer stayed with me the rest of the morning. I called her several hours after our walk. Here’s what I said:
“You know what? We all have junk drawers.”
Even as she laughed, I knew Mary got what I was saying, and then we talked about junk drawers for a while.
Yes, we all have junk drawers – sometimes more than one.
You might think of the kitchen catch-all drawer, where you toss the assortment of pens and pencils, along with paper clips, odd receipts, keys, rubber bands, and old, dried out tubes of Super Glue.
You tell me what’s in your physical junk drawer.
Mary and I realized there’s a significant difference between mental junk drawers and those kitchen junk drawers filled with pens and pencils and old receipts.
The mental ones? They contain pieces of our heart.
Our mental junk drawers accumulate the emotional stuff that have no easy answers. No resolutions in sight. We don’t want to leave all that stuff sitting out every day, so we stick it in a virtual drawer where we don’t have to look it all the time.
We’re all dealing with hard stuff. Problems we can’t fix. Issues that have no easy answers. Struggles that cause our heart to ache because people we love are involved.
One of the ways we get through life is by bearing one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). Sometimes that means we listen when someone sifts through the stuff in their mental junk drawer. And sometimes our friends listen to us.
Just listen.
You don’t have to solve someone’s problem to lighten someone else’s load.
What Helps Us Clean Out Our Mental Junk Drawers? #struggles #hope Click To Tweet 'You don't have to solve someone's problems to lighten someone else's load.' #quote by author @bethvogt #listen #friendship Click To Tweet
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Comments 12
I had a pastor friend that called it, “putting it on the shelf,” and that works too for putting an issue or problem aside until circumstances change or we’re ready to deal with it. Good and important concept 🙂 everything does not have to be settled “now.”
Author
Yes, “putting it on the shelf” works too. And you are so right — everything does not have to be settle now. There are things that can’t be settled now. Of course, that leaves us unsettled, but that’s when we walk and talk with God, right? And leave it in His hands.
The last sentence in your reply to Delores—that’s where I am right now. When there is nothing I can do to resolve an issue, I give it to Him and try not to pick it up again. But I like the idea of a mental junk drawer.
Btw, my real junk drawer has tools. 😉
Author
Pat: Ah, yes, the odd tool can end up in the junk drawer too. 😉
And yes, the trying not to pick up the unresolvable issue once we hand it to God — that’s the challenge, isn’t it?
This is a great analogy! Sometimes my mental junk drawer has so much junk in it, I can’t close it. That makes me rely on God all the more. I pray my junk drawer never empties. 😉
Author
Anne: The only way I would want my mental junk drawer to empty is for the problems, the issues, to be resolved. But using it to realize I need to rely on God — yes, I need that mental junk drawer.
In facing down the worst of days,
I know now that the honour’s mine
to greet the good and bad with praise,
the rainbow at the end of time.
Dreadful things? They did betide,
side by side with beauty bare,
and now I find no need to hide
from truth’s clean and bracing air
that sweeps around my hilltop place
to clear emotion’s clouds away
and show, at last, with smiling grace
that we’ve been actors in a play
that ends now as the curtain falls,
leaving only foot-light calls.
Author
Hi, my friend.
Thank you for sharing yet another beautiful poem, Andrew.
You’re in my prayers, as always.
It’s a lucky person who can compartmentalize things into a junk drawer rather than dwelling on it all the time. So many people get stuck or just worry over it.
Author
Denise: So true. The struggle is definitely in our thoughts, our mind.
Too often I’m emotionally attached to the stuff in my mental junk drawer. Decluttering the junk drawer relies on giving the junk over to God to sort out. When I do that, I feel so much freer and at peace.
Author
Such an insightful point, Scoti.