Clutter and Injury.

This is a transcript from sermon, 25/5/2014. Carol.

Gail and I went to the skip this week and during the time we were there Gail made a remark about how cheerful everyone was. I bumped iinto a lady holding a box who blurted out how much better she felt now she had managed to get rid of it's contents. Apparently, she'd had it for years and until this week couldn't face getting rid of it. I wondered what would have happened to this lady if someone had come and forced her earlier to do it. Instead of the relieved and cheerful lady, perhaps she would have still been grieving for the stuff and feeling out of control.

It's left me thinking about hoarding, laziness and what makes a person not want to do something............ and whether it bothers Jesus as much as it bothers some of us when someone else's life seems to be in a muddle. And I truly believe that some people are seriously more disturbed by whether someone has a tidy house, than whether they are well and at peace with their own lives.

You see, hoarding always has a root cause, and so does laziness, because the Bible does tell us that if we train a child in the way it ought to go, then it will follow that way for the rest of its life. (Proverbs 6)

So, it stands to reason, that if we live in squalor, never doing anything, then our children will see that as the norm and they will not be bothered if they live in squalor. In fact, this oblivion to the mess extends into other areas of their life, their school work, their clothes and visits to friends houses, their conversations and then into their work place and maybe into their own children's lives. Yet, we know that not to be always true, it isn't always the rule, because some children who have been bought up in a mess become so determined to change their own pattern of life, that they swing the other way and become obsessive cleaners.

What is clear to me, is that hoarding and mess do not equate to laziness. Laziness can be defined as "a disinclination to work." Some hoarders hold down some very powerful busy, high powered jobs. They can also work very hard at moving their hoard around and searching through it for things that they know are there.

So, there's no logic what-so-ever in claiming that a hoarder is a lazy person. They may get dirty because they can't move things around, but this still doesn't mean that they are lazy people.

The TV programs, where they go into people's homes and clear out, never cease to fascinate me. I love them, I sit there absorbed by them, listening to the stories, being dismayed by them and sometimes having a little cry too. The TV companies know that behind the junk is always a good human hard luck story, a death, disaster, an emotional break down or illness and so on. Usually a death because bereavement is often associated to an attachment to the hoard.

The TV company send someone in, usually a skilled Psychologist, to gently goad participents into revealing the mess in their mind, rather than really and truly facing the reason behind the mess in their homes. You see, all of us know that something has happened in their life, even before the program gets around to revealing what it is. But what we never get to find out is what behind them not coping with that issue in the first place in a relatively normal way?

Usually its a Spiritual issue that's at the root of all the mess. In a sense, it is deemed by others that they need a new life, not the program's unfortunate participant..........they need to begin a new life, and it's usually someone outside the home who has seen that and contacted the TV company. I know because I've watched quite a few of them!! Maybe that person is a son, daughter, friend or neighbour who really loves them, but are at the end of their tether because they feel helpless or embarrassed. Often there has been many rows, they have lost contact with other members of the family, or their long term friends haven't seen them because they themselves are too embarrassed to ask them round.

It makes really good television, because they go in and befriend the individual during a time of heightened tension. They lift some of the load off them, both physically and emotionally and then everything seems hunky dory again. In half and hour, TV time, their life and home is transformed, the atmosphere is emotionally charge, people are sobbing, even me if I'm watching, and there are promises of a radical change of life. But is this really, really true and sustainable?

One of the TV companies, The A&E channel in America, ran a Memorial Day marathon of the first season of its television show Hoarders. After showing all of the original broadcasts, A&E aired a new episode that showed the progress — or, rather lack of progress. Four of the five of the people featured in the new “Where are they one year later?” episode had fully returned to their hoarding ways. This is sooooo sad.

Let me read you what an American Psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, write about this matter.

“One of the worst experiences for someone with a hoarding problem occurs when another person or crew arrives to clear out the home, usually at the order of the public health department or a frustrated family member … These scenarios almost always leave the hoarder feeling as if his or her most valued possessions have been taken away, which in fact may be the case. Beyond this, most hoarders have a sense of where things are amid the clutter.

Do you remember that I said earlier, that hoarders knew where things were, that they weren't lazy people.

When someone else moves or discards even a portion of it, this sense of “order” is destroyed. We know of several cases in which hoarders have committed suicide following a forced clean out.

The time, expense, and trauma of a forced clean out are not worth the effort if any other alternatives are possible. Although conditions in the home may improve temporarily, the behaviour leading to those conditions will not have changed. Moreover, the likelihood of obtaining any future cooperation after such trauma is slim."

They go on to say, that in one town in America a survey of health departments revealed that forced clean outs had cost the Government over $16,000, that's £9,440 That's each one by the way, almost the total of the town's budget!

Yet just over a year later, the cluttered home was worse than ever.”

How terrible that there was a whole town filled with people and no-one could help the hoarders. All they all wanted was a resolve that was pleasing to their own eyes. How awful.

Did you know that we have a threshold for disorder. If we didn't everyone would be an impulsive and intolerable to everyone else. That's because we also have a threshold for tolerance behaviour too. Everything in our lives as we are living together, we have thresholds. All our lives are filled with thresholds for various things. From the moment we begin to leave the circle of our parent's thresholds as toddlers, we begin continually adjusting ours, as we adjust to living with others around us.

Becoming a Christian means that the old tolerance levels will be tested again and again and again. Because we have been reborn and have become like little children again. And this is the root of the word, to thresh (beat about) The dictionary defines the word as “The place or point of beginning; the outset. It's the door or entrance. " In the Bible it's a place of wrestling with our emotions, a change of life's direction, a meeting point, a place where God decides the direction the story is going. Isaiah 21:10

"O my threshed people, and my afflicted of the threshing floor! What I have heard from the LORD of hosts, The God of Israel, I make known to you."

In our Christian faith, if we find ourselves on the threshing floor, it's God who decides where our new point of tolerance is, not us, and that meeting point becomes our new threshold. This is what Jesus gives us, a new threshold.

Becoming a Christian, being on that threshing floor, opens our eyes to the underlying human hurt and suffering and in seeing that not all things are black and white, that only Jesus has the solution. That's because the changing is really taking place in us as well as others and that takes time, because that entails us learning Jesus' Word as well as those who are in a mess. We have a Spiritual mess as well as them.....did you know that? But Jesus helps us to see past the heaps of mess and catch a glimpse of the potential in the person, in the same way He sees the potential in us.

These TV shows are nothing more than sensationalism. A comment on the hoarders program said “ As a former television news journalist-back when they did real news-I can only tell you the two shows are the rough equivalent of a newsroom axiom. “If it bleeds it leads.” Or how about “if you have barn burner it will lead the late news.” ( Coyote Hunter)

Otherwise, they are stories that are cherry picked to interest and excite us . Programs that let us know what it's like to live on the extreme of life's norms, but they are not really interested in the causes.

I once worked for a company whose job it was to move elderly and disabled into more suitable accommodation, which was so often much smaller. The most distressing side of it was the lack of time and compassion afforded people within the system to deal with a reduction in their belongings. On one hand we were continually told to give people the time and space they needed, then on the other bosses pressurised us continually to meet performance targets and get people moved.

What I was confronted with was not always hoarders or messy people, but people who had an attachment to places and objects. They weren't people who had got to the end of their tether because of bad neighbours, or because they fancied a move. They weren't, begging the housing authority to move them......O please, please, move me because I have neighbour problems, or I need to be nearer family and frinds etc....... Yet, in my opinion, those who had Jesus in their life, coped somewhat better. They were motivated, had a more positive family support, their church families were a practical support and they were at peace because they were taking their peace and security with them and they could discern what's really important to them. Yes, there were things that were important to them and some loved their homes, but what they had in Jesus was more than all this.

By the way, I personally thought it was cruel in some cases, and one of the reasons I had to leave. I wressled with some of the logic behind it, especially as there were better alternatives in some cases. It was a case of misguided corporate compassion.

Please turn to your Bibles if you have one,

Luke 10:25-37

Good News Translation (GNT)

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

25 A teacher of the Law came up and tried to trap Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to receive eternal life?”

26 Jesus answered him, “What do the Scriptures say? How do you interpret them?”

27 The man answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind’; and ‘Love your neighbour as you love yourself.’”

28 “You are right,” Jesus replied; “do this and you will live.”

29 But the teacher of the Law wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”

30 Jesus answered, “There was once a man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when robbers attacked him, stripped him, and beat him up, leaving him half dead. 31 It so happened that a priest was going down that road; but when he saw the man, he walked on by on the other side. 32 In the same way a Levite also came there, went over and looked at the man, and then walked on by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan who was travelling that way came upon the man, and when he saw him, his heart was filled with pity. 34 He went over to him, poured oil and wine on his wounds and bandaged them; then he put the man on his own animal and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Take care of him,’ he told the innkeeper, ‘and when I come back this way, I will pay you whatever else you spend on him.’”

36 And Jesus concluded, “In your opinion, which one of these three acted like a neighbour toward the man attacked by the robbers?”

37 The teacher of the Law answered, “The one who was kind to him.”

Jesus replied, “You go, then, and do the same.”

How can we be different than the TV companies if we stumble across someone who is living in their own hell?

Do we have a right to judge them lazy before we have even got to know them ? A judgemental attitude towards someone is a barrier to having a positive impact on their lives and that's not a Christian attitude to have. If we are to help them, then we have to have a Christian attitude, that we see them through Jesus' eyes. He has a calling for their life as well as ours, and His first calling is to their soul and its salvation. Like the injured man in the good Samaritan story, they are injured people, lying on the edge of a road, there are official people who understand all the philosophy behind helping others, ie, the social workers, health visitors, counsellors and sometimes Ministers too, and they are just walking past their needs.

We are not called to be mugs, or free housemaids for someone who has no interest in Jesus what-so-ever, but we are called to respond in that moment when we realise that they are comatose in their lack of faith because of the state they are in. Or to respond when they realise that they need His help. This is what Jesus is teaching us, that having a judgemental attitude will cause us to walk by. It's our job to notice them, to take an interest, to be involved, to touch their life, to tend their wounds and lift them up.

Until the moment they meet Jesus, we are to be Jesus to them, vessels of God's Word. We are ears to hear and a heart to understand. We have the resources to encourage them, to bring them into a inn....which is church and to help them recover. We can pay the bill for them until Christ comes along to pay what we cannot afford to....and 'then' when we see Christ in them, we go with them into the mess with Jesus at our side. Because Jesus will be there then, just as He promised. And I tell you, you may even find that the person has begun to sort their own hoard out.

Jesus came to give us life in abundance and if we know Jesus we want that for them too, because that is a gift of His love. We must allow others to receive that gift of abundant love too because it will lead to a radical change in their life, just as it did ours. Amen

References

G Stekete, R Frost (2010) Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. Houghton Mifflin Harcour in Unclutterer http://unclutterer.com/2010/06/03/hoarding-why-forced-cleanouts-are-unsuccessful/

( Post comment ) Coyote Hunter August 17, 2010 Unclutterer http://unclutterer.com/2010/06/03/hoarding-why-forced-cleanouts-are-unsuccessful/

Good News Bible.

Image Clutterbug.me, http://clutterbug.me/2014/02/my-all-time-favourite-methods-for-kicking-clutter-to-the-curb.html. Accessed 29/5/2014 : 10.46