Why Marie Kondo Triggers Something Deeper In Us
Focus more on what you don’t yet use, and less on what you don’t yet have. Bring whatever you have to God, and he will use them through you.
paraphrase from Bob Goff, “Everybody, Always”
I think the reason so many people are attracted to the Marie Kondo movement of minimalism (finding joy and use in what you have, and releasing the rest) is because it is inherently an earthly glimpse into the spiritual realm. Finances and material belongings aside, we all have been endowed with gifts, positive attributes or traits, whether they be physical (running, throwing, hand-eye coordination), mental (intellect, impressive memory capacity and recall, analytical processing), or relational (empathy, compassion, hospitality, leadership). A gift implies a Giver, but we don’t even have to necessarily go there right now. All I’m trying to say is that we all have gifts. The more that we can clear our minds, make physical room, or find time to exercise those gifts, we feel more alive, more connected, more integrated, and more of a contributor to the world around us. Add in material wealth so prevalent in the West, and people have an overabundance on their hands.
The problem is that the more we accumulate, the more we devalue these gifts, and the more they become distractions. All these gifts basically lose value in our minds, because we have so many. So we gather more, seemingly “valuable” things to make up for them.
Think about how many times a day you think or say, “I don’t have enough time”, “I don’t have enough energy”, “if I could only buy THAT thing”, “I just need a bigger house”, “I just need a newer car/purse/golf club”. These thoughts are all indications that we are focusing more on what we don’t have, and less on the value and capacity of the gifts already in our possession. The more we try to add to our material gifts, the more we tend to subtract from the value of our spiritual, mental, and physical gifts. So we become fat, lazy, and ever more discontent.
In the spiritual realm, though, the whole is NOT the sum of the parts. In that layer of our world, less is more. When we look at things for their true value, we realize that there is so much use out of them, so much intrinsic purpose stored up in them. And when we wake up one day, because of a Marie Kondo-type event in our lives, we suddenly realize that the more we un-dilute and concentrate our focus on those innate gifts, the more value we find out of them. Then we find more satisfaction, and beyond that, we find more abundance in our lives. The sum becomes exponentially MORE than the parts, even though we have less parts. It’s because the gifts we’ve been given are enough. We just haven’t focused and honed them. If you are a follower of Jesus, then his good news becomes great news: we have more value to Him than we thought imaginable. Because of Jesus, we are enough. And that realization is the greatest gift of all.
