Necessary Endings

    Necessary Endings

A few months ago my daughter and I were having a chat and she said something that really spoke to me. She said there are times we need to have the necessary endings with things in our life. I had never heard that phrase but it kept resonating within me. 

I later heard this saying comes from a book titled Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. I purchased the book and then began applying the information. 

I am a very neat and orderly person by nature, but when it came to paperwork, I realized I needed to do some much-needed purging.

As I thought about it I began to see there were certain things in my life I needed to eliminate and a lot of them were paper related. 

I have a large file cabinet that is full of many things. As I began to go through folder after folder I found myself realizing I needed necessary endings with many of these items. 

Address sheets of 150+ people that I sent Christmas cards to each year when I was in full-time ministry. Christmas cards are almost obsolete!

Plastic bins full of teaching I did in Victory Bible Institute years ago and other teachings I did for women's ministry and marriage seminars.

 More plastic bins with information on writing a book on successful small group ministry. 

I have been retired for seven years and have not needed any of this material so I had a chat with myself that I would begin to purge paper.

I also realized that I had saved medical files and insurance files and now all that information is online so why should I keep all the paper?

I did get a little emotional throwing away some of the teaching material. I told my husband that I felt I was throwing away 30 years of my life when I purged the ministry files. 

We love to read and have purchased many books throughout the years. We had about 100+ books in the attic and we are giving many of them away. 

My husband has a mancave and there are 100 or more books on those shelves and we are slowly downsizing the library.

My niece recently gave me 100 books that are casual reading. I am slowly giving those away. 

I have to admit it feels like losing weight to get rid of all that unneeded paperwork!

I encourage you to check out those areas of your life that you can downsize.