On Travelling, Packing and Excess Luggage.

I love to travel… but I need salvation from the pain of packing. I can’t pack to save myself. My friend Afi is such a pro at packing up a suitcase. If I had all the money in the world I would hire her to be my personal packer. She would pack my suitcases for me and be a billionaire off me. I don’t know how she does it, but what I need two suitcases to pack, she would carefully hurl in one suitcase and it wouldn’t have an excess luggage bill to it.

The term packing light doesn’t seem to make sense to me and I pay for this. I travelled for a wedding once. I was to be away for just a week. I felt embarrassed when my luggage was being loaded into the car… I had to keep explaining to my travelling companions that I had three weddings in one day and had no idea what to wear, thus the excess load. Something came up and my week long trip turned into a month… what I packed for one week sustained me for the month and I didn’t have to repeat outfits often.

There’s the ‘what if’ outfit, the just incase dress, I mean you never know when you’ll be invited to a dinner with the president right? *raised eyebrows* There’s the what if I had to attend an event and the this and the that, and of course there’s shoes and bags to go with all that … like seriously, and you only end up wearing nothing most times.

I always have excess luggage when flying. It’s horrible! I realized at the last minute that BA had doubled its fee for extra suitcases. Now that hit me hard, I was mad at them, having to pay #140 instead of #70 per extra bag. That cut out a whole chunk from my duty free shopping list. Excess luggage is not only a pain, but it steals your joy… imagine not being able to get all you planned from duty free because you had to pay more than you bargained for excess… its more annoying when you get home to realize most of the things you filled the suitcases up with are just worthless junk you could have done without. Why buy packs of crisps and cartons of biscuits and other junk? We just love to hoard when we travel… don’t we?

I remember once in Dubai, after paying a lot of dollars at the airport for just a few extra kgs, I saw a woman open her suitcase and drop purse after purse, she dropped the lovely purses on the floor to be discarded because she couldn’t afford to pay the excess luggage fee for all the bags she had on her. She was probably buying them for resale. I’m sure she bought them from one of the markets and figured they were cheap enough and worth sacrificing than paying the price for the excess luggage. Some things we drag around we really don’t need, we can afford to leave them behind as we check in for our flights in life.

There’s so much baggage we’ve packed up and hurl around the place with us as we journey through life. It isn’t really worth it, the baggage and the fees we pay. We’ve let this excess baggage steal our joy and deny us of the rich and satisfying life we were promised. Thus we walk as Christians and hardly have time to enjoy the benefits of walking easy and picking up joy and peace on our walk, like shopping in duty free because we’re hurling luggage we don’t need and we’ve spent so much on the unnecessary we don’t have room to enjoy ourselves.

The people you carry in your head(or plan for as we like to say). The things you worry about. Trying to impress the world around you. Stop for a minute and repack. Do you really need that dress of worry? Do you really need the extra shoes of revenge? Do you need those pants of unforgiveness? Stop hoarding petty things that’ll weigh you down… Stop falling over yourselves and burying yourself in packed suitcases of sin because you’re trying to keep up with the world around you and impress your friends. It really isn’t worth it. There’s only one-way to enjoy your life’s journey, and that’s by being as free as you can possibly be.

“…let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us...” Hebrews 12:1