Unstuff by Hayley and Michael DiMarco

Unstuff: Making Room in Your Life for What Really Matters by the DiMarco’s is a book that I thought would help me get the rest of my junk out of my garage. I was surprised to discover that it was that and so much more.

The basic principle is that anything that is not God is stuff. Even the things that we do in service to God can be stuff, they can take up room in our mental and physical lives and prevent us from truly worshiping God. The book has six different areas that typically need unstuffing: Wallet Stuff, Mind Stuff, Body Stuff, Love Stuff, Worship Stuff, and Future Stuff.

The two areas that hit me the hardest are Body and Love. I was challenged in the body stuff about acceptable sin:

Just look around the pews at your local church and see how many people there are carrying unhealthy weight. If we looked around the church and saw that exact number of people smoking cigarettes, would we be as calm? Or what if the same number of people were groping their partners or wearing tube tops, short shorts, and fishnet stockings? Would we be outraged? (DiMarco pg 90)

I’m still noodling on that one and trying to figure out why some things are acceptable to me and others are not; something that I am trying to unstuff for sure.

The Love part was the other area and it was not the love of my husband or family that struck me most but the love of friends. I have a strong desire to spend more time with those that I love and to create even more bonds with those that I do not yet know. I have the unique privilege of being a pastor’s wife, so I have the opportunity to love on lots of people, but it is difficult to make the time to develop those relationships as much as I want. Unstuff has challenged me to push beyond some of my personal desires for rest and privacy in order to achieve my real desire to love deeply.

Unstuff is well written and challenging. I loved all the little sidebars, but I felt like the design of the book could have been better done with the text. Sometimes I was torn between reading the sidebars and reading the rest of the text on the next page. Over all, I highly recommend this book and hope to find a discussion guide for it so that I can read it again with friends.

A complimentary copy of this book was given to me by Tyndale House Publishers.

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