For Wilshire Baptist Church
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.
For an hour on Friday I carried planks of beech flooring from the back of my SUV into the garage and up the tall attic stairs. I added the planks to the stack of flooring already there. We don’t need it now, and we may never need it, but we have it if we ever do.
In case you don’t know, beech “is not common in these parts,” as they say. It’s mostly found east of the Mississippi River, so most of the hardwood floors around North Texas are cut from oak, pine, pecan and other native trees. We chose beech when we built our house because good friend Pat Hicks had a nice stack of it at his New Life Hardwood Floors. Pat is moving his business and needed to downsize his inventory, so I took the beech and hauled it up to the attic.
Attics are curious places. They hold things that we bring with us from other homes or that we replace or outgrow in our current life and yet we want to keep them close. We may never need those things again, or maybe we will, but we can’t decide so we shove them up the stairs into the attic and mostly forget about them.
But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.
My previous house was built in 1949 and had a small, decked attic space with only enough room to service the furnace and stack a few boxes. It was a dark, cramped, dirty, stuffy space and I hated even the thought of going up there. Whenever I had to call HVAC servicers they’d come down covered in dust and rock wool and sweat and almost crippled from bending over.
In contrast, LeAnn and I have four attic spaces that are tall, spacious and clean. Three are well insulated and one even has a door from a closet so you can walk right in. Once when the HVAC servicer made a repeat stop he said, “Oh yes, I like coming here.” We don’t feel the same about calling him, but we get his point: our attic is heaven compared to the hell he often must work in.
Our attics aren’t overflowing because LeAnn and I did a lot of purging when we married a few years back. Every time we moved our stuff – from our separate houses into storage and from storage into our new house – we culled things. One attic we call “the Christmas attic” because it mostly has our decorations for Christmas with a little Easter and Thanksgiving too. Another has boxes labeled “Knick Knacks” and some bins with old papers and photos dating back to college days. A third attic space above our bedroom is completely empty. Imagine that.
The garage attic is the least visited of the storage spaces; it isn’t insulated and doesn’t feel like it’s part of the house. Along with the beech wood it mostly has other leftover construction materials such as floor tile, porch railing, carpet – spare parts should we ever need them. And some metal chairs and lamps and other things that didn’t make the cut when it came time to decorate, and which begs the question: will they ever?
The truth is there’s really nothing in the attics that we can’t live without. If a tornado blew down the street, sheered off the roof and emptied the attics we’d be disappointed but not distraught. If there was something up there we really needed or wanted, wouldn’t it be stacked down here in the house right next to us? And yet we’re no different from anyone else. We store up what we think are treasures and even some things that never were treasures but they’re ours and we want to keep them.
While I was stacking the beech wood in the garage attic, I looked across and saw a bin full of items from my late wife Debra’s life: certificates, plaques, photos, college transcripts, high school drill team jacket. I have no children so there’s nobody to leave that to, or anything else we have now.
Maybe the climb up into the attic was not about the beech wood after all but God’s quiet way of reminding me that none of these things we store up as treasures have any real value. Except for the memories of life and love they represent and that we gather and store in our hearts.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.