RIGHTSIZING

We are in the process of moving these days. There are boxes everywhere. What’s worse is that we cannot use our front door when we get the mail or the paper or take stuff out that we are giving to the Vietnam Veterans. While we were away on our trip to California, a mother robin decided that the wreath on our front door would make a good nest for her to-be youngsters. Now anyone who comes to the door or goes out gets dive-bombed. She has about a week before some movers come and have to open the door to get her newborns on their way. We shall see.

At any rate, while I was out getting boxes from the local state liquor store, Arlena was having her teeth cleaned. She told the hygienist that we were moving because we were downsizing. The hygienist told her the new term for that is “rightsizing”. She was correct. The young couple who are buying our home are rightsizing as well. They need more space for their growing family.

We’ve all been there and will probably be there for the rest of our lives. In fact, all of life is about rightsizing. We buy the right size of the clothes and the shoes we wear. If we are smart, we purchase the car that is right for our family: a larger one as the family grows and a smaller one as the kids move out of the nest.

Sometimes we go too far as Arlena and I have discovered over and over again. That is the reason for our calling the Vets. We have too much: too many clothes, too many shoes. (Okay, too many shoes for me. Arlena, and no woman I know, has too many shoes. Her Mom at 97 still buys shoes!) Most of us have too much stuff and it is usually only when we deem it’s time to really right size that we do something about it, like now for us.

Unfortunately, perhaps even sadly, it is often only when we are in the process of rightsizing that we realize just how blessed we are: blessed that we have been able to accumulate so much; blessed that we are able to right size whatever that size is; even blessed that we can share our overabundance with those who have no abundance at all, who truly appreciate what we are willing and able to share.

Why we are so blessed is simply beyond my understanding. We have done nothing  to deserve what we have, all those blessing, especially when we know people who are more deserving than we are who seem to get the short end of the stick time after time. The only response I can make, perhaps that anyone of us can make who are so blessed, is to be open to the invitations that God somehow sends our way to use our gifts – material, spiritual, physical – to help those who are less blessed.

My daily prayer is to ask God to use me as God so chooses as that is the only way that I can even conceivably begin to give some semblance of thanks for all the blessings that I have, in my mind, undeservedly received. It took rightsizing to open my eyes.