All dolled up and nowhere to go

 Cars were parked up and down the block as I arrived at an estate sale that had advertised fabric. I’m always watching for inexpensive flannel to sew baby blankets donated to hospitals for needy families. The two long tables stacked with material didn’t have what I used, but as I moved on through the yard I was astonished by hundreds of dolls and doll paraphernalia. It went on and on....The same was true of ceramic and glass trinkets burdening other tables. Going inside, it got worse. Multiple sets of dishes and other knickknacks were meticulously organized and priced.

I’m thankful that my community has two groups (one benefiting a local non-profit agency) that hire out to conduct estate sales. They relieve survivors of an often oppressive burden in breaking down a household. I handled that task after my parents died.  It was a long and difficult process requiring, in my case, seven yard sales. The most challenging items to sell were my mother’s tea-cup and salt-and-pepper-shaker collections

That recent day, as I inched around heaped tables, I asked one of the helpers if this was one of the bigger sales they had handled.  He nodded and replied, “There’s another sale next week. We haven’t even started in on the basement.”

Convicted of my own “piles,” I came home and loaded a box for the local thrift store!      But I couldn’t get the heaps of dolls out of my mind.  How long had that person collected them?  Did she play with them? Or were they boxed away because she didn’t know what to do with all of them?

Walking past so many dolls, I thought of a girl in Haiti we have sponsored for years through a compassion ministry. Sometimes we sent extra (above sponsor fees for her schooling) for her to buy herself something. Months later we’d get a translated thank-you note indicating she used the extra gift to buy food for her family.  One time she admitted she bought a doll.  ONE doll.

I’ve had recent encounters with real-life hoarders, and it is sad and frustrating. But this estate sale’s piles of dolls astounded me.  I thought of Ecclesiastes 5:10-11, which says, “Those who love money [or what money buys—my add-on] will never have enough.  How absurd to think that wealth brings true happiness. The more you have, the more people come to help you spend it.  So what is the advantage of wealth—except perhaps to watch it run through your fingers!” (NLT). 

This person didn’t live in a wealthy neighborhood. Most of it is smaller “starter homes” that are a half century or so old. But her compulsion to collect dolls and other trinkets was apparently big in her life.

In contrast, the apostle Paul held loosely onto “things.” It was the only way to live as an underfunded traveling evangelist in days when your feet or a boat got you places. “Godliness with contentment is great gain,” he counseled his protégé, Timothy.  “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content” (1 Timothy 6:7-8 NKJV).