Wednesday, March 21, 2012

De-clutter with prayer

Cry unto him in your houses, yea, over all your household, both morning, mid-day, and evening. (Alma 43:21)

If you are deep in trouble with clutter, you need the Lord’s help. You need miracles, and a bunch of them. You need the miracle of inner change that will help you change your circumstances. Those miracles can start with fervent, sincere prayer, constant prayer.

  • Pray about your confusion of what to keep and what to let go.
  • Pray for a different and better perspective of the purposes that your stuff should have in your life.
  • Pray about your worries about what you might need “just in case.”
  • Pray that you will be given the spiritual gifts of ingenuity and resourcefulness if a need for something you have let go suddenly arises.
  • Pray to have the spiritual gift of discernment and to acquire better judgment about your needs than you now have.
  • Pray to discover better criteria by which to judge how much is enough and what should be gotten rid of.
  • Pray to have stamina and endurance—mental, emotional, and physical—to deal with all the decisions you must make about your stuff.
  • Pray to be kind to yourself and not be judgmental of your past self as you begin to make different decisions from what you made in the past.
  • Pray to maintain your motivation during times when progress seems slow. Pray for renewal of desire to de-clutter.
  • Pray find disposal methods that are BOTH easiest AND wisest.
  • Pray to be led to people who can teach you good habits of dealing with stuff and who will teach you both by example and by edifying words.
  • Pray to find ways you can change your personal habits such that you won’t get in this predicament again.
  • Pray to find people who will validate your efforts and celebrate with you over your efforts.
  • Pray to feel peace and not fear.
  • Pray to be able to overcome temptation and any obstacle that might stand in your way to de-clutter.

For a story about how praying helped someone de-clutter, you can read my post “Prayer: the powerful tool for overcoming the fear of de-cluttering” on my blog Zion Space.


For a post about how de-cluttering involves repentance, you can read my post “De-cluttering and repentance” on that other blog as well.



If you want to see how clutter is closely related to idolatry, you can read the chapter from my book here.

2 comments:

Ramona Gordy said...

I have been reading your recent posts, and they bother me, but in a good way. I have been working on some of the issues you have listed, and I have felt that Heavenly Father wants me to really pay attention, and do what is needed. I have been whittling down my clutter, emotional, physical, and mental for about 5 years. It is an exhaustive process without therapy. But I believe in prayer concerning these issues because they are spiritual. I have found that its not enough to clear the clutter,but also the action or activity that lends to the clutter, such as impulse shopping, misplaced attachment to things.etc
So what is helping me is to trust in God. That's it. I have to trust in God enough, so that if I only had the clothes on my back, I would be ok. If I only had enough food for a day, then, it would be enough, and mostly I pray to not fear, but be of good cheer.
Thanks for this post.

Michaela Stephens said...

RGG, You've hit the nail on the head--trust in God. It's trusting that He has the power to provide for your needs if you suddenly have an emergency and don't have enough.

And you are so right, the habits that brought the clutter also need to be addressed. Inner change is needed as well as outer change. The atonement of Christ is meant to help us achieve the inner change.