©Lisa Risager (Wikimedia)

©Nevit Dilmen (Wikimedia)

The boxes sit all around me, saying, “Okay. When are you going to fill us with Christmas ornaments and take us back down to the basement?” They can no longer be ignored. Well, I’ll ignore them a little longer because these boxes have reminded me of all the other boxes in my life. And I want to tell you about them …

I am a woman. Women have many, many boxes in their brains. This truth was confirmed to me by the teaching of Mark Gungor, who leads marriage seminars. He uses the word picture of boxes to convey the various areas of our lives that are important to us. He goes on to say that all the boxes in a woman’s brain are connected by wires to all the other boxes. He is so right. Women do connect the house box to the husband box, which is connected to the boxes for children, grandchildren, meals, travel, extended family, memories, weather, books, church, and shopping.

Personally, I found this approach to life exhausting. One box could short-circuit all the other boxes. Then I realized I had one more box, immeasurably bigger than all the others. So, I disconnected the wires that ran from each small box to other small boxes, took those wires and connected them to the Big Box.

The Big Box is God, of course. All those small boxes are still open at the same time, but they are only seen as they relate to the Big Box. No one small box can ever stop me in my tracks again. Even when information from the wire of a small box is delivering unpleasant information into the Big Box—once it is in there, it doesn’t stand a chance of dominating my time and energy. The situation or the relationship is put into perspective. It’s now in the God Box, or—to use a more familiar expression—in God’s hands.

All the memories connected to these Christmas ornaments—I place them now in God’s hands.

I’ll go back to storing away Christmas.

But isn’t that just like God to take a few empty boxes—that came out of the house box—have them meet in the Big Box with the writing box … and out pops a post?

~A.R. (Alice) Cecil