“Through skillful and godly Wisdom  is a house (a life, a home, a family) built, and by understanding it is established [on a sound and good foundation]”  ~Proverbs 24:3   (Amplified)

I’ve been cleaning and organizing, and getting my house in order for fall.  And you know what?  I hang on to a lot of stuff I don’t need and will never use.  I spent most of this week sitting on the floor of the spare room upstairs, going through piles of paper, notebooks, photos, scrap-booking supplies, school papers, etc.  And, I have a new hobby:   I have discovered that I love to shred paper.  It’s fun, and incredibly therapeutic.

I love putting on a pot of coffee, and spending a day organizing and rearranging rooms;  putting away summer stuff, and pulling out all of the autumn decorations:  candles, pumpkins, mums.  (For some reason, I remember my grandmother planting purple mums in the bedpans she brought home from the hospital.)  Add family, music, food, or sports on the TV, and it makes for a perfect fall weekend.

I don’t do the flowers-in-the-bedpan thing, but I do play Christmas music in September, because my mother always did.  And we bake:  pumpkin bread, cut-out cookies in fall shapes with leaf sprinkles, brownies.   And it feels like home.  It’s not perfect, and a lot of our stuff is handed down treasure, and it isn’t all perfectly organized the way I want it  (in my dream home everything is freshly painted, the projects are all finished, and the photos are all neatly and beautifully organized into themed scrapbooks) but it does finally feel like a home.  It is home, and I am grateful and blessed.

Part of bringing order to your life is taking care of all of the details, like the things you own, store, and have to maintain.  Some of it involves sitting down and taking an eye-opening look at your financial situation.  What things do you buy mindlessly?  Can you go home and take what you have and rearrange it, or pull things out of cabinets and closets and decide to either let it go, or use it?  Exactly how many rainy days do you plan on having?    When you go into a store and look at a display, instead of thinking “How can I buy that?”  think instead:  “What do I already own that I could use to recreate that look at home?”  You don’t need as much as you think.  Filling a cart at T.J. Maxx with beautiful items and putting it all on a credit card is not prosperity.  (Although it can feel like it.)  Prosperity is knowing that all your bills are paid and you have money left over to pay cash for the items in your cart.  The money you save by not buying things can be used to pay down existing debt;  this is part of getting ready to be able to minister in the future. Get your house in order;  get your storehouses (bank accounts) in order.  Free up time, space, and finances as part of your ‘getting ready.’  But don’t get so caught up that you forget to spend time in study and prayer.  That is still to be the priority.

“For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.”   ~Matthew 6:21