What is the state of your Junk Drawer? You know you have one! You may call it something else, but you have that space somewhere. Heather Creekmore asks, “Where do you put that random screw that must go to something but needs a home until you identify where? Random lids, twist ties, and pens, lots of pens…Where do they go without a Junk Drawer?” During a kitchen renovation, she was without this catch-all space and missed it. I can relate, it was one of the last drawers packed during a recent move. After all, I might need an elastic band, a twist tie, scissors, and some of those random screws when everything else is packed away in cardboard boxes. Personally, I do not have a Junk Drawer, it’s just a place in the kitchen. This label might even slightly offend me because, as my sister recently observed, “Even her Junk Drawer is organized!” Just add it to my extensive list of quirks.

While reading daily through Creekmore’s Aging Gratefully, her parallels and connections to other books I am currently reading is extremely captivating. She addresses the fact that as we age, sometimes we are required to clean out our mental Junk Drawers, “…we face a dilemma. We either stare at the memories, pain, hurt, and regret and sort through them, or we become weighed down by the volume of overflow junk in our hearts.” What I read was Creekmore’s perspective on concepts that I mention in two other posts, Use and Eliminate and Take Out the Trash. However, even more intriguing is that her biblical perspective mirrored Brianna Wiest’s ideas from The Mountain is You when discussing healthy emotional processing.

As a person who feels the burden of leading, coaching, guiding, and mentoring Emerging Generations, I wonder, Am I equipping them to deal with their own Junk Drawers? For me, this is why in the discipline of health and human performance, I care deeply about teaching students about the 8 Dimensions of Wellness and the Habits of a Flourishing Life. It is through the lens of these concepts that students can learn healthy coping strategies that provide the skills necessary to process their emotions and feelings appropriately. We all have emotional baggage, or Junk Drawers, that need to be dealt with in healthy ways.

Linking to what I call the Habit of Attentiveness, Wiest shares that our physical bodies are connected to our emotions (and the other six dimensions as well). “Emotions are physical experiences. We flush our bodies of everything, and regularly so. We defecate, we sweat, we cry, we literally shed our entire skin once a month. Feelings are no different, they are experiences that must likewise be released. When not felt, emotions become embodied. They become literally stuck in your body.”

It’s from that place that I feel that Creekmore offers us an amazing solution to cleaning out that Junk Drawer. “Scripture gives us telling instructions on how to deal with the past. We’re directed not to dwell on it. To forget it, even. Yet this can’t mean taking memories, stuffing them in that drawer, and shutting it tight. We may convince ourselves that we’ve forgotten. But emotionally we carry that Junk Drawer with us, often not recognizing when bits of it spill into our relationships.” Wiest offers some excellent strategies for dealing with the past, but I suggest that we build on that with Creekmore’s perspective. “We lift that unidentified trinket from our heart’s Junk Drawer. Then we ask God to help us identify it…Then, finally, we put it where it belongs. Sometimes that means simply laying it at the feet of Jesus.”

In support of Creekmore’s perspective, she shares two meaningful passages from Scripture. One, is from Isaiah 43:19 which I share often about God doing a new thing in our lives. The second comes from Philippians 3:13-14 where Paul encourages us to look forward to what God is calling us to do. “Following these instructions authentically requires us to empty that Junk Drawer, to recognize that our God is just, kind, and big enough to help us face our emotional mess no matter how monstrous it feels. He can help us heal.”

As Creekmore inquires do you have “someone trustworthy and biblically sound to help you sort it out? Don’t wait. There’s no shame in getting help—the only shame is in living a life weighed down by emotional baggage.” Who has been your trustworthy and biblically sound person? Would you be willing to share their role in your life, even if you prefer not to identify them by name? Please share in the comments below.

References:

Creekmore, H. (2024). Aging gratefully: A 30-day devotional for women. Our Daily Bread Publishing.

Wiest, B. (2020). The mountain is you: Transforming self-sabotage into self-mastery. [Kindle version].Thought Catalog Books.