How I Gave Up What I (Think) I Didn’t Need.

The short version: you won’t give up what you don’t need until you realize you don’t need it. We oftentimes accumulate unnecessary things out of fear of the future, but we need to trust in the God who knows our needs better than we do to give us what we need. Additionally, give those things we don’t need up, don’t just get rid of them. Giving up has more dignity and a respect for the thing itself that getting rid of something, or even someone.
The substantive version: It’s 6:35pm in the evening here in Houston, Texas and over the past 2 days I have collectively donated nearly 120 pounds of unnecessary clothes (mostly), papers, and whatnot. To put this into perspective, I have only 10 shirts (inclusive of workout shirts), 2 pairs of shorts, and 3 pairs of pants to choose from on the average day out in the city. I had a lot more clothes before the “purge” and I had even donated about 50 pounds of clothes in December but after coming home from college and from my 2.5 month long pilgrimage I had decided to live into what I learned and received from my education and travels — which is live only with what is necessary.
The thought process follows:
“If I have all of these clothes, and I’m not wearing all of them; and there are people in the world who need the clothes I have more than I do — then that means by having these clothes in my closet, I am depriving someone else of greater need of something that can potentially fulfill their need.”
Good thought Zac. *self-five*
To add to this thought process, I also subscribe to the ideal of the Universal Destination of Goods, an idea found in the treasure of Catholic Social Teaching which states that the whole of creation is not owned by humans but by God and is thus to be stewarded in such a way that everyone’s needs are met. The destination of all the good on Earth and outside of Earth are to those who need them, not those who really really want them because I “need” a blue shirt for that one event in the future… just in case. With this idea, you can still have private property, of course (we all need some alone time and some space to have that alone time), but the priority of the property itself is not for your own benefit but to fill the needs of others.
It’s pretty lit isn’t it.
It’s like your kindergarden teacher’s rule of “sharing is caring” but in more fancy and grown-up language.
But the topic of this post is not how good of a person I am for theoretically giving to others by donating my clothes to some thrift shop that perpetuates the cycle of low-end consumerism, the topic of this post is how I arrived at this place. And I just simply painted the backdrop of the essence of give up everything.
I spent 37 days walking the Camino de Santiago, specifically the camino frances, which is a 1000 year old 500 mile (800 km if you use the metric system) pilgrimage from the south of France to the western edge of Spain. The thing about the Camino, as I will refer to it, is that you simply carry a backpack with all of your things with you from village to village as you walk through the pilgrimage, and that’s it. And after a few hours of walking you can really feel the weight of your backpack on your shoulders and back, each pound (or kilo) proclaims its presence to your already tired body. So you have to be very careful about what you pack and how much your pack weighs or else you will lay down in your bed after a long 6 hour day of walking and you might not be able to get back up because of your back pain. It gets to the point where people bring safety pins instead of clothespins because clothespins (which are already quite light in my opinion) are too heavy. Yeah.
In essence, I was quickly introduced to the reality that anything that I bring but don’t necessarily need or am bringing “just in case” I run out weighs me down. It’s an almost perfect allegory for life where anything I bring with me in my body and soul (clothes, grudges, etc.) on the pilgrimage of life potentially increases the weight of every step towards our ultimate goal.
And I brought a lot of extras with me for the first couple of weeks…
I kept them because I thought I was strong (I had weight lifted for a couple years, but it was a year since I lifted… silly Zac) and I needed an extra shirt just in case I was too lazy to hand wash my clothes one day and I needed that shirt for the next day’s walk. So I thought. And yes, us pilgrims hand-washed our clothes (though some used the washing machines if they wanted to be fancy and pay a little extra), and that was a humbling learning experience in and of itself that I can touch on in a later post.
I remember I was in Burgos, about two weeks into my pilgrimage, and I woke up one morning and I couldn’t feel the toe next to my big toe on my left foot. I moved the toe around to see if everything was okay with it (I knew obviously not) and as I moved the top part of my toe I could feel a *tick tick* of two different bones rubbing against each other. I was pretty sure those two bones were supposed to be held together by some ligaments or by, you know, bone, so I quickly looked up what might be the problem and I self-diagnosed myself with having a hairline fracture in my toe. My doctor would be proud. And that was the day that I left the group I had been walking with for two weeks and had to take it easy because of my toe. That evening, a girl from France was talking with me about how she brought safety pins instead of clothespins because people told her it was important, and as she took her things out of her pack I saw that the contents of her bag were so much less compared to the contents in my unabashedly large 50 liter bag.
What was I bringing that I needed more than this girl who was bringing less but thriving/surviving just the same?
That day I gave up everything that I thought I didn’t need. I was nervous at first because I thought that things like shirts and underwear were already so light that if I were to give them away that it wouldn’t make a huge difference in the overall weight of my bag, that I would just be giving away an opportunity to indulge in laziness and not wash my clothes. But I was pleasantly surprised by the raw reality that the fact that I gave up 3 shirts, 2 pairs of underwear, a bottle of cologne (my aunt gave it to me and I’ve been using it everyday since), and some other things, that the collective weight of the items given up were substantial enough to not only have my pack feel considerably lighter but also have lots more room in my pack so that my boots wouldn’t have to hang on the outside if I wanted to wear my sandals instead of my boots. And my boots were like little microwaves on my feet that when I put my feet in, I got blisters when they came out of them — I didn’t use them much.
Essentially, giving up the things I didn’t need had unintended beneficial consequences that I didn’t foresee. And I think that it had a similar effect when I do a similar unnecessary item purge in real life, but I have yet to find out the positive consequences.
In this instance, I had an encounter with someone in a place and time when my heart was open to the proposition of giving up what I didn’t need. And I think an integral part of me getting over that hump of getting rid of what I didn’t need was an increase in trust in God, because I had many things “just in case.” An extra soap just in case I ran out, an extra shirt just in case I needed it: I didn’t need them, they were a safety net I put up for myself. I began to trust myself instead of God.
Matthew 6:25 says, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.”
By being by myself walking 6 hours a day, I was able to slowly enter into the doorway of God’s mercy and the consequences of His teachings. Matthew 6:25 is pretty explicitly clear, but oftentimes it can go over my head or even into my head and not penetrate my heart like it did on the Camino.
Ultimately, to get rid of what I didn’t need, to get rid of over 170 pounds total of clothes and stuff and to get rid of extras I paid my hard earned money for on the Camino I had to arrive at the place of humility and realize just how small and insignificant I am, and how infinitely significant God is and take His invitation to live a life of adventure and trust in Him. I had to realize that I need to receive and accept more love than I deserve. Obviously this doesn’t mean that I live with nothing and don’t work to “trust in God,” God doesn’t help those who don’t faithfully help His work, but I shouldn’t be so insecure about life that I have to have that blue shirt just in case for that one event in the future; but I should be grateful for what I have, and realize that perhaps I won’t need or necessarily want that blue shirt in the future for that event. By living with only what I believe I need, prayerfully discerning my needs and wants, I allow myself to grow in trust in God and His power to provide. Besides, if God is really all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving, then there isn’t a good reason for Him to not give me what I need.
And a radical thought, perhaps what I need is not always what I perceive as feeling good, but perhaps those things which hurt me are what I need, even if I don’t want them; so it’s my simply job to accept all things as coming from God as grace.
Finally, I think it’s important to differentiate between “giving up _______” and “getting rid of _______.” There is a difference in intention where “getting rid of” something often implies that the something is negative and that it is worthy of being “thrown away,” and definitely some things are like the meat in the fridge that you forgot about 2 months ago. But “giving up” something is a release of the thing, realizing that the thing has dignity because it is a part of God’s creation, whether you need it or not, but you are “giving” it to someone rather that “getting rid” of it. Giving involves two parties, one to give and another to receive and really plays into the social aspect of humanity. You don’t need more than one person to get rid of something, though oftentimes we get rid of people when we don’t fully awe in their dignity.
So, the lesson is to slowly give up everything we don’t need by making yourself present in situations where, perhaps, God is inviting us to trust Him and give up any unnecessary safety net that we set up that causes us to trust ourselves instead of trust the one who knows what we need before we think of it. And I don’t think that giving up what I don’t need is a one and done kind of deal, it’s a life-long process of consistently coming back to God and offering to Him, especially in His distressing disguise in the poor and needy, that which we have chosen to accumulate.
Simply, trust.
Your brother,
Zac
