“Sometimes we find holy objects when we are cleaning out a drawer. Perhaps we dump the contents out on a bed simply because it’s time to declutter … and there it is: the thing. Perhaps we pick up the thing and remember something that we’ve pushed away, pushed back, and hidden. Maybe, we think, if we edit enough, we can erase all of that, all of the tattered parts of our lives.
“And yet there it is. The key to the home you shared with a partner until the idea of being together was suffocating and ‘until death do us part’ evaporated into a promise you knew you had to break. The candle marking the birthday that started a year that you still wonder how you survived. The photo of a relative who died, a loved one who harmed you, and your first thought is, ‘I thought I threw all of these away.’
“When we ask God what the things that are important to us can reveal, we might find a memory that slides under our skin, one we had almost forgotten. We might find a dream we had pushed aside. We might hold an experience of God that we hadn’t considered before.”
