When is Enough Enough?

Are you a collector? If you are, you’re in good company. Lots of people enjoy collecting … something. The most popular collector items are antiques, vinyl records, comic books, and coins, but hey, the sky’s the limit. When I was in high school, I collected motion discomfort bags from different airlines. Don’t laugh; apparently, I wasn’t the only one; when I decided to get rid of it, the collection sold quickly on eBay.

Collecting can be a harmless enough hobby, but for some people it can become expensive—and obsessive. But it’s a whole different matter when collecting turns into hoarding.

The poster kids for hoarding were Homer and Langley Collyer. Born in the 1880s, they were the sons of a wealthy physician. Both Homer and Langley were college graduates—and Langley was even a concert pianist who played Carnegie Hall—but both men never married and lived at home with their parents in a four-story brownstone mansion. When their parents died in the 1920s, Homer and Langley inherited the house and all their money. One practiced law; the other sold pianos. They both taught Sunday School. They had social lives. Two quite normal men—or so it seemed.

When Homer lost his eyesight in 1933, Langley stayed home and took care of his brother. After all, they had money and neither one needed to work. But they became increasingly anti-social and eventually got to the point they never left the house. This only aroused the curiosity of the community, who stared at the house and assumed the brothers were hiding money and treasures. All this only caused the brothers to become more anti-social.

And that’s how life continued until 1947. An anonymous call informed police of a dead body in the Collyer mansion, but police couldn’t get the door open. Junk was stacked from floor to ceiling. They had to use a ladder and go through the second-story window. It took a while to work through the maze of stuff piled everywhere, but they finally found Homer Collyer sitting in a chair—dead. He had only been deceased for a few hours, but it became clear he had starved to death.

Homer’s body was removed, but the house still smelled of a dead body. It took the police two weeks to find the body of Langley under all the debris. Here’s what the police pieced together: Langley had been taking care of his blind and paralyzed brother, but apparently, a large pile of stuff fell on Langley, killing him. And Homer was left to starve to death.

No heirs and no will, so the city of New York was left to clean out the house. It took several months to remove an estimated 140 tons of stuff. But this mess wasn’t just old newspapers and trash. The city also removed a huge assortment of furniture and … well, odds and ends. Lots of odds and ends: an early X-Ray machine, baby carriages (plural), guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, eight live cats, and fourteen pianos. And let’s not overlook the chassis to a Ford Model T—inside the house!

The brownstone is long gone—replaced with a small park—but the phrase “Collyer’s mansion” is now a code phrase within the New York Fire Department for the house of an extreme hoarder.

While some people just don’t like throwing anything away, others collect in anticipation of “a rainy day,” a time in the future when they’re going to need it. I shared a house with a college roommate. I opened the pantry one day to find soup. Lots of it. Our small pantry was overrun with cans and cans and cans of soup. He didn’t hit a sale; he just wanted to make sure he had enough. (If we had hosted a party for the entire university, we would have probably had soup left over.)

I’m all for keeping what you need on hand. We live in a time and culture where we don’t have to live from hand to mouth, walking to the market each day for the bread we need that day. But we’re missing an element of trust in God when we feel we must “over provide” for ourselves.

Can I be content with what I have to take care of my immediate future? Go ahead and plan. Save. Invest. Be wise—but trust God.

“Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear…. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you” (Matt. 6:25,33).

Do you hear the trust in that? God will provide.

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