This morning my Mom and I cleaned and sorted through items removed from the church office. The contents are currently residing in the church lobby because the office recently got new carpet.

We found lots of junk. Stacks upon stacks of old phone books and catalogs. We found an office supply catalog from 1996. A really funny treasure we unearthed was an extremely dusty box of floppy disks. Remember these?

We also found old Sunday school attendance books dating back to the early 90’s. I was impressed with the detail and care someone put into recording the information. The record keeper recorded mundane details such as the toddler class had an offering of .02 one week while another late July day had unusually cold and rainy weather in the low 60’s. Sure these books are taking up space but I found them a fascinating look at where the church has been.

At our old church, I was responsible for organizing and stocking two supply cabinets for the children’s department. I tried to work on the closets about twice a month, thirty minutes each time. The closets were never picture perfect but this amount of time seemed to keep things fairly under control.

The problem with trying to organize something like this is no one has ownership of the space. Lots of people use it but typically only one or two people have a interest in it. I was constantly frustrated with people who opened the closet door, pitched something in and walked away. Hey! See the tub labeled markers? Take two seconds out of your life and put them away! The old stuff we threw away today was the same old issue. No one cared to take the time over the past 10-15 years to clean and organize.

I took a few pictures today with my phone. I’ll see if my IT guy (my husband) can pull them off the phone and I’ll post them in a couple days. Its not a “whoa! look at that” sort of thing but its a vast improvement over what was there previously.