The staircase to Grandma Sugar’s attic was like a time travel portal. One short flight and you found yourself in a dusty, dimly lit space filled with stuff of another era.

Her rack of clothes caught my eye. These were not glamorous vintage pieces you might imagine worth saving for posterity. Just simple cotton dresses. Lots of them. Worn shirts, sheets and brand new handkerchiefs, still in the original packaging. Clothes hanging on a rack covered with a dusty sheet. The clothes intrigued me. Grandma Sugar had more clothes than she could say grace over downstairs. Why save the clothes?

“You might need them,” she explained. Then she told stories of “repurposing” clothes; taking an old worn dress and making it into something new by cutting it apart to remove the stains and tears. Hers was green living from an earlier era. She embodied the maxim in the WWII poster which read, “Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do or Do Without.” The lessons of the Great Depression had stayed with her. She squandered little.

I appreciate her frugality. It stands in such stark contrast to our disposable market view today. Last year’s iPhone is so … last year.

Yet her rack of clothes troubled me. She didn’t need them. She didn’t repurpose them. Out of her fear of not having enough, she clung to them until they were useless. The fabric of new handkerchiefs literally cracked in half when opened, having become brittle over the decades.

The clothes were like her personal insurance policy against not having enough. These clothes, items that might have been useful to someone decades before, were destined for a landfill. Not green living.

She clung to these clothes out of fear, not out of possibility. Lent is a journey that begins in the empty space of the desert, and ends in the space of the empty tomb. We know how this story will end. Yet each year, we begin again a 40-day journey – essentially a 40-day prayer, hoping we will be drawn closer to God and changed by the encounter.

We’re more than halfway through this Lenten journey. It’s a good time to stop and look around, to take stock in where we’ve been, and to hope where we are headed.

We think we’ve entered the desert empty-handed, but have we? Too often, we come encumbered by our stuff: old resentments; petty grudges; and the literal stuff of our lives – the material goods we crave, dream about, “must have.”

Stuff has an insidious way of owning our lives. We replay old resentments in our mind. We mindlessly flip through the ever-present catalogs which fill our mailboxes. And we spend hours cleaning, sorting and finding space for the stuff that somehow snuck into our homes – stuff we must have “needed” at one point in time, or thought we needed.

For most of us, having an encounter with God requires we clear out a little space first.

The Greek word for emptiness is kenosis. In the Christian tradition, we empty ourselves to become more open to the presence of God in our lives. It is our emptiness that creates this possibility.

In contrast to the barren desert, we have been given another image, that of living water. Living water in the scriptures is often a sign of God’s blessing. To be filled with living water – the presence of God in our lives – we must make space. What happens to our fullness if we never create an outlet for this living water, this expression of God in our lives? Hoarded in a glass, water, even pure, clean water, turns fetid in time.

Consider the Dead Sea. The Jordan River flows into the Dead Sea, but there are no outlet streams flowing from it. The water which hasn’t evaporated is eight times saltier than the ocean, making it one of the harshest environments in the world. Animals cannot survive in this environment, hence the name.

Without sharing the continued outpouring of God’s love for us with others, our lives become stale and dead. Our hoarded abundance becomes dry and brittle, unusable to us or anyone else. So we make this Lenten journey, taking stock and emptying ourselves in this desert time, hoping to be moved once again by the living waters of God.