Theology of a yard sale

Early last Saturday morning, my siblings and I dragged card tables and boxes of household paraphernalia out to my dad’s lawn to set up shop for a summer yard sale. As any of you who have done a yard sale know, our work started days (and, for my dad, weeks) before – deciding what to take back to the attic or price for the sale, post on Ebay, take to an antique store or toss in the garbage. 

Choosing what to keep was tricky: what do we do with the worn placemat set our mom sewed all those years ago? The statue from our grandparents’ house that none of us really like but which reminds us so much of their personalities? The lopsided ceramic pinch pots or lumpy vases with “I love you, Dad” or “Happy Mother’s Day” scratched on the side in kid penmanship? We took a no-guilt approach. If it was too hard to decide what to do, the item went back to the attic for another day. We photographed some of our childhood art to keep its memory alive. And we decided nothing too extra-special would leave our house with a “25 cents” sticker on it.

After decisions were made, though, pricing posed another challenge: what is the value of an objectively ugly candleholder that has no real worth but immediately takes you back to being a child on Christmas Eve? What about the suitcase that still smells like your grandmother’s perfume? The chipped salad bowl that went with the family to a hundred potluck dinners? The LP album recording of the first violin music you ever learned?

It is an odd sensation to feel overwhelmingly blessed by abundance and simultaneously territorial and protective of it. More than once I felt guilty about having so much excess and likewise judgmental about what other people might do with it, how they might abuse what we had loved or at least not appreciate its meaning and significance. It is strange to mix together nostalgia and greed, generosity and loss, gratitude and defense. We know we are blessed, and yet we sure do cling to our stuff.

I like to shop at yard sales and thrift stores myself, so I’m quite familiar with the other side of this equation, too – looking for a good deal on something I might recreate into something new, or something that might recreate me or my home. In the end, that was the best part of our sale: finding out how others were going to create something new from our cast-offs. There was the man who bought all those beautiful polished rocks my dad had collected and all those seashells that had been hidden away in a box in my closet - he’s going to give them away on Halloween instead of candy. A woman bought all those old ratty placemats to remake into aprons. One guy was so excited to find among our records an LP of Weird Al’s Dare to be Stupid. Another woman anticipated scoring big points with both her husband and son when she brought home my brother’s old Star Wars light saber.

Someone bought the violin songs record. Someone bought the tie that said “I love Jesus” all over it, and someone else bought the oversized glow-in-the-dark rosary (both had been gag gifts to my dad, and both were snatched up by very excited customers). The woman who bought my grandpa’s desk is going to use it for her sewing machine. Another who bought our broken camp stove is giving it to her husband who “loves to fix things.” Our LIFE board game went right through a minivan window and into the waiting lap of a kid who had been wanting one for years. Someone else happily snatched up my two sock monkeys on her way to a two-year-old’s birthday party. Everything that was left in the end went down the street to another garage in preparation for a different rummage sale the next week.

For all the loss and sadness of letting go of our stuff and the memories it held, the whole thing turned out to be a lot about new life: new air breathed into old things, new uses found for what seemed to be useless, new light shed on what had been dusty in the darkness. The creative spirit of the customers inspired us and gave us ideas. Because other people saw our stuff with new eyes, we did, too – which made it freeing to let it go to be new again. And the goal of the whole adventure was to help my dad clean out our family home to make space for his new wife’s stuff and their new life together. And we did.

The famous “for everything, there is a season” passage in Ecclesiastes 3 includes the idea that there is “a time to keep, and a time to throw away.” We did both last weekend. The wisdom of Ecclesiastes 3 is that it reminds us that times will come and go, and they will change. What was new will become old and often new again.

In the past I’ve understood the passage to mean seasons are distinct, as if the writer were saying, “There is a time for everything, and seasons pass one to another – from a time to keep to a time to give away.” Our yard sale gave me a different perspective. Seasons are not pure and separate, they are mixed up – like our nostalgia and gratitude, our generosity and greed. Perhaps it is not that there is a season where we keep and a season where we throw away, but that in every season we are to discern what to keep and what to throw away, what to plant and what to uproot, what is dying and what is being born – and in it all to keep a hopeful watch for new life springing forth.