What a whirl of emotions. I enjoy garage sales quite a bit and having my own sounded like a great idea, especially since our church decided to have another mega garage sale. You might be thinking big, but I am talking mega, as in HUGE. This year I volunteered at our church garage sale to price items, where I thought we would be given a bunch of stickers and have items lined up by price…well, I was wrong. They did hand me a stack of stickers with a pen and I was asked to simply price items as I thought was fair. My first thought, “are you kidding me”, my second thought, “this could be fun”. One thing I was told is “we want to get rid of stuff, not keep it”, and “everything should be approximately priced, a dime on a dollar”. A dime on a dollar? Do you mean to tell me that if a person paid $10 for something, now we get to sell it for a buck? Yes, that is exactly what they meant. It certainly opened my eyes to the idea of my own garage sale. I have pre-priced everything before even heading out to help with church mega sale, but once I came home, I have re-priced pretty much everything as I realized things will not sell. Our main goal for this garage sale was to get enough money, to send gifts to our sponsored children all around the world and in our case, we have seven of them, so that put quite a bit of pressure to sell for more. It was a blessing to have our parents and Oleg and Lilya jump on board and with our team efforts it turned out to be a great day. I don’t know how others organize garage sale on regular basis, for me it seemed like a big job. Not only do you have to gather all of the things that you know you do not use, but you also need to price them, get them in one location and get up before the sun comes up to put it out in front of your house. Oh, and of course the yard sale signs to put up where it would drive traffic. Long story short, it was a great experience. We teamed up with our dear neighbor and made it happen. I was blown away by people bargaining, just when you think you already put a pathetic price on the item, they ask to pay less. What do you do? You sell it to them for less, just so that the item would leave your front lawn. All of this experience made me realize how worthless stuff is. Here we go out and buy all of this “stuff” to make ourselves “happy” and what do we get? Just “stuff” that we eventually get tired of and want “new stuff” and the cycle keeps going. All in all, things are worthless! It became more clear than ever that our life here on earth is so temporary yet we so easily forget and carry on as if we are here to stay. This sale has definitely put an end to clutter, I am all about useful, practical and needed items. I took it as a great lesson from my Father above and am so grateful for this experience.
