Stumbled across a show I hadn’t seen in a while. It was an episode of Hoarders. Piles and piles of clothes, food, eggs, yes, eggs from her many chickens and stuff everywhere with no place to sit and barely enough room to walk through. The pros came in to a terrible stench of rotten eggs everywhere. She was so afraid of not having food to eat she would save the eggs and stash them in among all the stuff. Most would break and rot.

    Her story was that she grew up in poverty and never had enough. She was now living alone and began to fear of not having enough so she started her journey of hoarding. She had wasted so much time and money buying things she would never use and all the while fearing she wouldn’t have money to live on. It was an irrational fear and it took great care, counseling, and effort just to make any headway in cleaning up the stinky situation.

    Too many of us live with an irrational fear. We fear we aren’t enough. We fear we are less than everyone else. We feel unworthy to be loved. These and so many more fears lead us to live full yet empty lives. We try to silence that fear with things that simply will not satisfy and even at times will work against us thereby confirming our fears.

    What this woman was starting to realize was that her hoarding had physically and emotionally pushed away the very people who truly loved her, her family. Your fears can push away the One who loves you unconditionally. Fear pushes love out. They cannot coexist for very long. Only one of them can reign unchallenged in your life. Fear only leads to the stench of death. Love clears the way for true life to begin and flourish.

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