What are you hoarding?

What are you hoarding?

Readings for the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time


I hate to admit it, but I am a bit of a hoarder. I’m nowhere near the level of hoarding you see on reality shows where the health department and dump trucks need to intervene. But I do have several piles of paper, magazines, written records, and notebooks filled with my scribblings from the last 20 years! Thankfully, I’ve enlisted a scanner to reduce the piles, but now my hoarding is merely digitized.

I tell myself that the reason I hang on to all these things is because I think I will need something in that pile someday. Sometimes that’s true; most of the time it’s not. If I were brave enough to go deeper into my behavior, I might discover that all these things, like the wealth of the eager man today, keep me feeling in control, safe, and secure. Yet in the long run, they simply hold me back and keep me anxious.

Do we place our trust in what we can control and in what keeps us comfortable? Or can we give our entire trust over to God? Share on X

Jesus’s invitation to the wealthy man to give everything he has to the poor is not about possessions, just as my hoarding is not about stuff. It’s about who we trust. Do we place our trust in what we can control and in what keeps us comfortable? Or can we give our entire trust over to God? If we can trust God, the rest of our stuff will fall into place.

 
This post was first published in “GIA Quarterly: A Liturgical Music Journal.”
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Image credit: Eli Francis, unsplash, CC0.

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