It’s a cheese grater.  An ordinary cheese grater.  Well – perhaps not “ordinary” – it’s a fairly high-end cheese grater.  A “deluxe” cheese grater, according to its packaging.  It’s the kind waiters in fancy restaurants use when they offer to sprinkle cheese on your soup or salad.  The kind with the round barrel and wind-em-up handle.

 

This cheese grater sits in my cupboard.  It’s never used – it just sits there collecting dust.  I came across it the other day while I was cleaning out the cupboards.  I’ve gotten rid of a lot of clutter in my house lately – things I thought I needed at one point, and perhaps even used for awhile, that no longer have a role to play in my home.  

 

The cheese grater needs to go.  I never use it anymore.  I discovered that my $5 flat-with-sharp-holes version works much better – it doesn’t get clogged up like the high-end version.

 

Eventually, the cheese grater will find its way to a goodwill store, to be sold at a bargain price to someone who will hopefully use it more than me.  But for now, I’m keeping it in my house.  I’m keeping it to remind me of the journey I’ve been on.

 

In the traditional definition of a journey, one normally knows where it begins and ends.  When you set out on a journey to visit the mountains, for example, you can easily identify the moment you left the house and the moment you arrived at the mountains.  (And when you leave, you can wave through your rear window, and say to them, as my three-year-old daughter did, “Good-bye mountains!  See you tomorrow!”)   In life’s metaphorical journeys, however, things aren’t always that clear.

 

The journey that involves the cheese grater began years ago – perhaps even at the beginning of my life.  There have been twists and turns along the way – these things rarely happen in a linear fashion – but eventually all roads led to a high-end, round barreled, wind-em-up-handled cheese grater making its way into my cupboard.

 

I have nothing against cheese graters – really I don’t.  It’s just that I didn’t really NEED a cheese grater.  I had a perfectly functional one already in my cupboard.  And yet, somewhere along the line, I convinced myself that the cheese grater would make my life a little better, and that perhaps my pizza and pasta would be elevated to a new level of culinary goodness.  I suppose I could blame society (the all-mighty “they” who convinced me material goods would satisfy, or the persuasive salesperson who knew how to appeal to my culinary senses), but that would be senseless, as it was ME who forked over the money, after all.

 

The cheese grater is no different from all those other things that have entered my house – they’re perfectly harmless in their own right, mostly very useful things.  But not NEARLY all of them should have passed through my front door.

 

Fifteen years ago, I graduated from university, an idealistic student, bound and determined I would not become one of “them” – materialistic, suburban, complacent, middle-class people whose world view is about as broad as the gas in their car will take them.  If you’d asked me back then, I’d have said, emphatically “NO I DO NOT NEED A DELUXE CHEESE GRATER!  LEAVE THAT TO THE BOURGEOIS CLASS!”

 

So, what happened along the way?  It’s hard to say.  It was never anything dramatic – no thunderbolt from the sky turned me from an idealistic student to a materialistic suburbanite.  It was much more gradual than that.  At some point along the cheese grater path, I began accumulating things.  Perhaps I got a little buzz from the first possession that felt a little extravagant.  Perhaps I liked the feel of it in my hands.  (I took a marketing class once where I learned that if you can get someone to touch the product, it is 75% sold.)  Gradually, I (and later my husband and I) started filling the available spaces with more and more stuff.  Each time we moved, we moved into a slightly bigger space and wondered what we’d do with all the space.  Before long, though, the space had been filled to overflowing.  

 

These days, we live in a typical suburban bungalow with our three children.  Yes, that means I’m a suburban, middle-class…  well, I don’t have to paint a picture for you - you know where this is going.  With a growing family comes more and more stuff – some of it necessary, but lots of it excessive (like all those stupid little MacDonalds happy meal toys).

 

At some point, in the last few years, we began to awaken from what felt like a long sleep.  What woke us up?  I’m not sure exactly.  It was probably a combination of things – a book that inspired us, a good conversation with a friend who’d learned some of life’s lessons, an encounter with poverty, something on the news, a good look at what Jesus says in Luke 12, maybe the twelfth time we stepped on a happy meal toy – any number of things could have contributed.  One of the things I CAN point to that impacted us both was the still birth of our son five years ago.  He never breathed, but his presence in our lives changed the way we viewed the world.

 

We started to look around and recognize where our life had headed.  We saw all the things we had accumulated, we saw how often we were heading off to Wal-mart or Superstore for more things, and we stopped to ask ourselves a few questions.  Do we really need all this?  Is it making our life any better?  Have we been buying things to try to fill some gap in our lives?  Did we give in to MacDonalds’ convincing argument that their meals would make our kids “happy”?

 

Our home had become cluttered beyond a comfortable level.  We couldn’t keep much order anymore, because there weren’t enough places to keep all the things we’d accumulated.  We didn’t invite people over as often, because the clutter was always at least a little out of order, and we didn’t want people to see our messes.  (After all, what would they THINK of us if they knew how disorganized we were?)  Our relationships had changed, our priorities had changed – our lifestyle had headed down a path we hadn’t planned to travel down.  Not only had WE become accumulators, but we were modeling it for our kids, teaching them it was a worthwhile way to live.

 

So, as we began to awaken from a long season of sleep, we began to make changes.  In the examination of our lifestyles, we decided that we could feasibly reduce our expenses and consumption sufficiently to rely on only one income, thereby freeing one of us to stay home with the children and pursue further education.  My husband was happy to comply – he quit his job.  With one less daily destination, we could give up one of our two vehicles.  We also gave up a myriad of other things that we could easily do without – the cell phone, the extra channels on TV, the cleaning person (yeah, we needed that person to try to keep all our STUFF in order!)  

 

The following year, we reduced even further – I quit my well-paying government job and accepted a lower salary working at an NGO that was more in keeping with my value-system and required me to work fewer hours and have less attachment to a cell phone.  More things got dropped.  The camper was sold and the kids learned the fun of sleeping in a tent again.  The big van we’d bought to pull the camper was reduced to an economical car with enough trunk space for a tent and cook stove (it’s got enough trunk space for the three kids too, but don’t tell them that’s our fall-back plan).  Magazine subscriptions, restaurant meals (yeah, even the happy meals), impulse buys – one by one, they got stroked from the budget.

 

Next, it was time to look around our home.  Gradually, we pared down our possessions. We gave away bags and boxes and trailers full of excess stuff.  Almost everyone who entered our home was asked what they’d like to take with them.  Furniture, clothes, toys, books, kitchen gadgets – every item had to pass the test if it were to stay.  Did it hold any value to our family?  Was it making our life better or worse?  Would we miss it if it were gone?  Could someone else make better use of it than us?  Did it hurt when we stepped on it for the twelfth time?  Was it getting in the way of our relationships?

 

The cheese grater was just one of the things on a long list of things that had to pass the litmus test.  It didn’t take a lot of contemplation to realize that it served more to frustrate me than to make my cheese grating pursuits any easier.  (And, alas, my pizza and pasta has failed to reach the level of those fancy restaurants with the well-suited waiters with cheese graters in their gloved hands.)

 

I’m willing to give it up - that pesky cheese grater.  It’s already made its way into a goodwill bag once, but, I confess, I retrieved it before the bag left the house.  (Some metaphors are too good to give away, after all.  My mom, who was the best storyteller in Sunday School, always taught me the value of a good object lesson.)  

 

You see, it has occurred to me that the cheese grater represents so much more than just grated cheese.  It represents the role that all that clutter has played in my life.  I brought it all home, with high expectations that it would improve my life, but somewhere along the line, all it did was clog up my space, clog up my relationships, and get in the way of my freedom and happiness.  Now, in frustration, just as I’ve dug into the barrel of that cheese grater, I have to dig into the clogged spaces of my life to try to free myself for a better, richer, less cluttered life.