Incomings and Outgoings

The latest news from Fort Organized:

I gave a good many hours of my life to de-cluttering our bookshelves today.  Books were jammed and stacked and leaking out the middles.  I didn't think it would be a horribly difficult task but I quickly realized why we had so doggone many books...and it's called book-tossing guilt.  I don't know if it's a job well-done by the librarians of my past or my collective unconscious that cringed through the book burnings of days of yore or my hippie soul that can't stand the idea of all the paper/cardboard waste, but it was agony.

With it being done, though, there is satisfaction in seeing that the books left on my shelf can catch the view again like they've moved from the inner-city to a nice country estate, and oh the joy in knowing that #6 has seventy percent less potential mess he can make when his pull-books-off-the-shelf! button goes off.

I've been thinking about Doctrine and Covenants 88:119-120 this week where it says that we should organize ourselves - every needful thing.  And it says we should do that so that our incomings and our outgoings can be in the Lord.  My bookshelves must be on that every needful thing list because their tidiness has me going in and out of our living room grateful to my Father in Heaven for the blessed goodness of simplification.