Gilded toys of dust

On Tuesday I did laundry and washed my ipod. It doesn't work anymore.

This is the most recent in a long line of possessions lost (or now broken) in little over a year. I'd thought myself a fairly responsible, if sometimes absent-minded, person, but I'm developing a bad track record. A few notable entries, the ones in italics are things I lost for long enough that I thought they were gone forever but eventually recovered them:

favorite brown cardigan

beautiful drawings from Guanajuato, MX

off-white cardigan

black fleece

rain jacket

swiss-army knife

Perelandra

toothbrush plus travel case

several favorite earrings

The Case for Life

a favorite scarf

socks. always the favorite wool ones.

Similarly to my last post, this list seems a little less impressive written out. But I persist. Perhaps I've forgotten things. In any case, it's made me think a fair bit about the relative insignificance of the stuff I own. I still miss my brown sweater, but it matters little whether I have one or not. Not to put to fine a point on it, what matters most is that I have Christ. I guess I needed practical reminders of this.

I am trying to hold things loosely in the metaphorical sense, while realizing it probably wouldn't hurt to hold onto stuff a little more tightly in the literal sense.

I've been remembering this verse from All for Jesus:

Worldlings prize their gems of beauty

Cling to gilded toys of dust

Boast of wealth and fame and pleasure

Only Jesus will I trust.

My heart sank a bit when I uncovered my ipod, tangled in my sheets in the washing machine. That's the worst it did, so I'm imaging that having an ipod wasn't an idol of mine, but since then I've been thinking about what my reaction might be to having other, more precious things taken from me, and what that reveals about my heart. It's sobering.

This post is a bit roughshod, but I knew if I didn't write tonight I'd never get back to it. These are my recent musings, friends. I want to relinquish my grasp on what really isn't mine.