A few years ago, my sister and her family found their dream house. When it went back on the market, they put an offer on it and the owners accepted their offer. They were then given two weeks to get their own house ready to sell. At the advice of their realtor, they were told to get rid of their tchotchkes so that pictures could be taken to entice potential future home buyers. Umm…get rid of their what?

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a tchotchke as a knickknack or trinket. (pronounced: \ˈchäch-kə , -kē \)

The online Urban Dictionary top definition of a tchotchke says this: A small piece of worthless junk, a decorative knickknack with little or no purpose. (Urban side note: Tchotchke can be pretty, sentimental, or even occasionally useful though it usually breaks easily if useful. If you are having trouble identifying tchotchke just look around your house or someone else’s and whatever you see that a burglar wouldn’t steal is probably tchotchke.)

Do you feel ever so much smarter with that new word in your vocabulary? I know that I do and I used it all day long when I went to help my sister pack up some of her house. “Hey…hand me that trophy tchotchke…and the 17 others sitting beside it.” “I spy with my little eye a blue tchotchke.” “I think my tchotchke is acting up…may need to take a break.”

Packing up a house to sell, while necessary, is hard to do. You have to clear out the clutter so that new homeowners can envision moving in their stuff without trying to look past all of your knickknacks. But systematically going through everything that you’ve accumulated and deciding what stays and what goes isn’t easy. It was very hard for my 10-year old, sentimental, craft-making niece to get rid of anything. “But Ms. Josephine gave that to me…it’s special!”; even when that “special” thing has been crammed, crumpled up and mangled beyond recognition behind and underneath a pile of other “special” things. Let me just say, we spent a great deal of time in her room negotiating and discussing what should be kept and what should be thrown away.

Our hearts are just like this. As we go through life, we fill the shelves in our hearts with the things we collect along our journey: the security of growing up in a home with parents that love you and each other, the joy of getting exactly what you want for Christmas, the annoyance of your sisters getting in your stuff and copycatting everything you do, the worry over whether or not you will ever have a boyfriend, the fear that you will fail your driver’s license test (even though you’ve already successfully made it through Driver’s Ed and your dad’s intense driving lessons), the pride in graduating from college and securing a job straight away, the happiness of a wedding day, the excitement of starting a new life with the one you love, the shame of making a really bad choice, the guilt of living with that bad choice for many years after, the elation of finding out (three different times!) that you are having a girl, the overwhelmed feeling of being a stay-at-home mom trying to care for three young ones, tend to a sick parent, be a good wife, work part-time, and go back to school…all at the same time, the anxiety of trying to raise good, Jesus-loving kids in this dark world, the contentment of looking around at your little family and saying, “We may not be perfect, but life is pretty good!”, the pain of having that contentment ripped out from underneath you with the words, “I’m not happy anymore,” the suspicions that there is someone else, the anger that what you’ve suspected is true, the hope that you can change and fix and pray and beg and cry to put things back together, the embarrassment when you cannot, the depression that follows, the loneliness that creeps in, the discouragement that drags you under, the doubts that things will ever get better, the love that you find in the only One who will never leave you or forsake you or betray you or hurt you. The shelves of our hearts are lined with all of these things. We display the emotions and memories that we are proud of in front of the ones that we are ashamed of…but they are all there taking up space.

So, maybe it’s time to take inventory. Maybe it’s time to look around your “heart house” and start cleaning out some of the tchotchkes. Maybe you take everything down off the shelves of your heart and systematically go through everything deciding what to keep or what to toss. That anger over finding a sequence of texts online? Throw it out. That anxiety over where the money is going to come from to pay to fix the car? Put it in the bag labeled “garbage.” That all too present emotion of rejection that lingers in the background threatening to destroy any new relationships? Toss it to the curb. All of those feelings of doubt, discouragement, fear, worry, anxiety, overwhelming bitterness and anger? Replace them with God’s good things: love for others, joy even when you’re hurting, peace amidst the raging storm, patience for those that seem to know just what buttons to push, kindness to those who most definitely don’t deserve it, goodness to those who have wronged you, faithfulness that He has a plan and it is good, gentleness in how you speak to others even when you want to scream and yell and get the last word in, self-control in all that you say and do so that you reflect His love to others.

Allow God to give you eyes to see what needs to stay and what needs to go…what can decorate the shelves and what needs to be replaced. You may be asked to let go of some things that you want to hang onto…things that fuel your hate fire…things that you are not quite ready to forgive…things that still haven’t been revenged…things that still cause worry, fear and anxiety to well up inside. Hanging on to things that God asks you to surrender only invites the enemy to occupy space in your heart. Once the enemy gets a foothold and is allowed to freely walk around the walls of your heart, he adds all of his junk a little bit at a time. Give that clown the boot, tell him to take his dollar store trinkets with him and invite Jesus in to do some housecleaning. He will help you clean the shelves of your heart and chuck the tchotchkes.

“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalm 51:10 (NIV)

“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” Ephesians 4:31 (NIV)