Islam's Green: Moving House

If you are wondering why there have been next to none in terms of postings recently it is simply by and large due to being involved in an activity that I seriously recommend you avoid having to do too many times in your life. Moving house.
The simple fact was that we needed a bigger place. Four kids stuffed into one room, with one of them starting secondary school was not the most convenient of circumstances, and with one bathroom between the seven of us, and the house in an almost constant state of disarray moving was beginning to look seriously attractive.
Moving house, however, is a mission.
Over the month of almost constant packing and the four days of over half a dozen fully laden van trips I look heart thinking about the suffering of the people of Lebanon and the rubbled remains of what many of them used to call home. For some reason seeing pictures of destroyed homes sickens me in away that even pictures of death does not. I think its because home has always been, at least mostly, a happy place for me. Its where I retire, and am happy to retire at the end of the day. It's where I find refuge and happiness with my family, and family, it seems, is so much at the heart of our religion. Well, at least I had a home and new one to move too, unlike those suffering in Lebanon. May Allah compensate them!
Over these weeks I have been thinking of some lessons from this whole experience of moving.
One of the thoughts that came to me is just how pathetic and facile creatures most of us are. To think how greatly I feel my life is enhanced by a couple more rooms and cupboards! I don't by this mean to praise naked ambition and the desire to amass lands and palaces, as if your ambition was more your condition would more worthy. In fact it is only more pathetic. No, it is that we are so easily pleased by some small worldly benefits, and so ready to abandon much for what is little. It is so clear that the increasingly terrible condition we find ourselves in on this planet today needs people to be devoted and dedicated and to sacrifice, but we are so easily placated with trinkets.
Then there is the amount of junk we accumulate. Piles of completely unnecessary garbage, yet we can't seem to able dispose of it either!It's like we want to convince ourselves that it really was/is/will be useful one day. How much money was spent and how many resources expended? And we are accountable for every atoms worth of it. Our children need Quran and iman, but we give them play and plastic! How unlike the Prophet about whom it was said that there was nothing in his house except cleanliness!
I don't mean any of this to be ungrateful to Allah. In fact I can assure you that I have experienced the truthfulness of the Prophet's words concerning the blessing of a spacious dwelling, may Allah bestow such upon you in this life and next, dear reader!
I take heart from one matter, which leads to Green tip number two, following the re-use, recycle mantra, I didn't go and buy lots of boxes, I reused old ones being chucked out by the local Iceland and Sommerfield.
Now all that remains is to unpack! That will probably take the next month or two. Hey, but at least I've got something to unpack and place to unpack it to!

Alhamdulillah.