This past week was our community’s so-called cleanup week.

Across the various cities that comprise our metro, each municipality offered a special dispensation to residents, allowing them to dispose of a copious amount of items (within reason) that otherwise the rest of the year would not be allowed.

Cruise through any neighborhood during this couple of weeks each year, and you can see mounds of items heaped on the curb, destined to be hauled away by trash companies.

On my nightly walks with the family pooch these past two weeks, I must admit that as I passed pile after pile of household goods in just our short, 45 minute circuit, I was saddened by the excessive amount of stuff cast aside.

Now, before I go any further, and lest I seem to be pointing an accusatory finger at everyone else, some transparency:

Yes, our family too has utilized these spring cleanup weeks to dispose of broken furniture, outdoor yard stuff that we’ve outgrown, household items, etc. We too have way too much stuff. Further, that is most assuredly on me more than it is on my spouse.

Secondly, I have even benefited from this annual celebration of materials purging. Much like many others, I have a time or two scouted out items on someone’s curb that still had a lot of useful life in them and brought them home. Our boys even drug home an entire couch one time!

There, I am just as complicit in this annual act of excess as all my fellow city mates. 

But still, my heart has hurt as I’ve seen truckload after truckload of consumer items once presumably loved or desired now cast aside as detritus. I can’t even imagine what the total tonnage thrown away is for a metro area now above 250,000 people. And this is just in a couple weeks’ span!

Lord, have mercy. … We are a wasteful sort.

As faithful people, we are warned about the dangers of excess. We are advised that our contentment cannot be found in things, and that a life of true belief would be full of generosity and a focus on others.

And yet we continue to buy and buy and buy. Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. We even rent storage units to hold the stuff that we can’t fit into our ever-growing homes! Seriously!

What’s the remedy to this obsession with overconsumption? I don’t have the answer, but I do know that a start would be a turn from us looking inward for fulfillment to us looking outward for our meaning.

Jesus teaches us that it’s impossible to serve both God and money, and ergo things.

Jesus also teaches us about the importance of giving, sharing and contentment. None of which we will likely find in all of our stuff that will eventually one day find its way to a curb somewhere during cleanup week. Amen.

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.