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Christmas decorations. Plastic tubs filled with out-grown clothes. Boxes of books. Camping gear. Twin-sized mattresses. Seldom-used baking pans. Sleeping bags. Winter hats and gloves. Bunk bed frames. What do you keep in your attic?
Grandma’s attic
My maternal grandparents’ home in Illinois had a set of narrow, steep steps up to their attic. As children, we went up there to find treasures. That’s where Grandma stored trunks of memories. I played with my uncle’s toy soldiers up there. It’s where we found the trombone I played in sixth grade.
Attics are wonderful places, if you like to explore. Many adventures begin in attics, clues to mysteries are found there, and searches for meaning often end with the treasure found there. My girls read a series of books about a young girl who explored her grandmother’s attic and found items that aroused her grandmother’s memory and started all sorts of stories and lessons.
Attics and crawlspaces
By definition, attics are the part of a house directly under the roof, and can contain rooms, storage, or nothing. Crawlspaces, by contrast, are areas under the house, not high enough to stand, that give access to plumbing or wiring. Crawlspaces generally are only visited by necessity, usually because something needs to be fixed.
The attic in our house
Because of the pitched ceilings in our house, our area below the roof is actually more like a crawlspace. The space between the sloped ceiling joists and the roof has just enough room to crawl the length of the house at the peak. It’s useless for storage; the access hole in the laundry room ceiling is barely big enough for a person to go through. I recently spent most of a day up in our crawlspace, dragging narrow lengths of plywood across the rafters to spread out my weight. I replaced a bathroom fan and its exhaust pipe and installed a board between the rafters to anchor a new wall. It was a hot, dusty, cramped day.
Years ago, as we planned to build finished walls in our full basement, we realized we needed to dedicate some space for storage because our under-roof space was unusable. We built a fairly large room (about 10 feet by 13 feet) behind the basement steps, lined it with shelving and put up some scavenged industrial lighting. We call it “the Attic”. Visitors are often confused when we talk about going “down to the Attic” to get something.
Cleaning the attic
Just like any upstairs attic, our basement attic gets cluttered to the point of being unusable. Every so often, Lynn decides to “clean the attic”. This usually requires multiple days of moving boxes, rearranging camping gear, and throwing away items whose values diminished while on the shelf. The trigger for this activity is generally the need to store something else, so the attic is soon full again, but with more useful stuff. Or at least that’s the idea.
Cleaning the attic often requires answering questions about our life as we look through the boxes. Do I keep this, or throw it away? Will this be useful someday soon? Is it obsolete? Why did we keep this in the first place? Will we ever really use this? The goal is to clear out space so we can put something else there.
Cleaning the attic reminds me of Paul’s admonishment to the Colossians about replacing things in their lives (and ours, also):
But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him… Colossians 3:8-10
After listing the things that need to get tossed out of our attics (the “put offs”), Paul describes what we need to add to our lives (the “put ons”):
Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering; bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection. Colossians 3:12-14
The attic of my mind
Whenever I look into the storage boxes of my mind, I find stuff that I wish I wasn’t keeping. But just like our attic shelves that collect junk if they are left empty, I have to replace the “old man” thinking with “new man” thinking. In his letter to the Romans, Paul called it “renewing your mind.”
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Romans 12:2
After giving examples of how to walk in the will of God, at the end of the next chapter, Paul sums it up with a simple but profound “put on”:
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts. Romans 13:14
Treasure storage
Mary, Jesus’s mother, also stored things for later use:
But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. Luke 2:19 (NIV)
But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. Luke 2:51 (NIV)
I believe Mary pulled out these memories for Luke when he “traced the course of all things accurately from the first” {Luke 1:3 (WEB)}. Paul’s imprisonment in Caesarea gave Luke, who was traveling with him, over two years to research the events in his gospel (Act 24:27). He probably personally interviewed Mary and some of the other apostles.
What’s your treasure?
Attics and hearts are storage places for things we want to bring out to use in the future. But be careful that what you store is truly useful.
A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks. Luke 6:45
By His calling, in His strength,
Dean
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