Why am I standing here with a bag?  It’s a normal kind of a rolly overhead luggage bag, pretty normal. Even has a little red ribbon on it that my daughter has put on it so I don’t lose it when I’m at the airport in a couple of weeks.

What is it about bags?

I think a lot of us in life carry a bag around ALL THE TIME.  Consciously or unconsciously, we’re always think we need to look after our baggage.  

And I want to give you the example of when you’re travel travelling somewhere on a plane.  You know, it’s a bit like life.  You spend time loading up your bags.

• You’re loading them up with stories,
• loading them up with past experiences,
• loading them up with things that are relevant to your map of the world.
• Loading them up with stuff and then we cart it around.

Ohh, it’s so heavy and we’ve got to carry it ourselves.

Other times, there are wheels and we’re wheeling it around because it’s easier that way to carry our baggage.  And then when we get to the airport, the people at check-in say

“Excuse me sir.  Can I take your baggage?”  

And often we don’t want to give it away.  We want to keep the baggage because our baggage is important to us.

• It’s got all our excuses in it.
• It’s got all that justification and reasons in it.
• It’s got things that we need so we can justify to keep carrying our baggage.

“No thank you ma’am.  I’m going to carry it on board.”  

“Are you sure you don’t want to check it in Sir?   You’re sure you don’t want us to take your baggage away?  Put it somewhere else where you can’t see it so you can just forget about it?”

“No. I want to hold on to my excuses – I mean baggage.”  

So we take our baggage.  We go up the escalators – we go through security.  Sometimes other people may want to check our bags for security reasons.

They say “You know we want to make sure that you’re safe and we want to make sure that the people around you are safe.  We want to check inside your bags that there isn’t anything dangerous that can hurt other people.”  

Some of us can accept that, some of us get a little bit confronted.

“Why do you want to check my stuff?  I’ m fine.  I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone.”  

And then we grab our bag and we wheel it away.  We get on the plane and we’re sitting down.  And again the stewardess is on board and will say

“Please sir, you need to get rid of your baggage.  Please put it in the overhead locker.”  

“But I want to keep my baggage.  I want to hold on to my baggage.”

Then the announce is made and we hear “For your safety and the safety of others, please secure your baggage in a safe location.”  

And even then, we might not be able to help ourselves.

We’re going to pull out stuff from our bag because it’s so important to us that we have to have those baggage contents, we have to have those stories with us all the time.

So whilst we get rid of this bag, we might be left with a smaller bag that we’ll keep right near us.  Another bag that we can see, we can touch at any time that we’re travelling.  We’ve still got a little piece of baggage.

How many things in life are a little bit like this?

How many things in life for you revolve around baggage?  How much are you carrying around?  How much are you holding on to, telling yourself that you don’t want to hurt yourself or anyone else.

But maybe that bag is so big and heavy that when that bag hits someone, it will only hurt them.  And if you drop the bag on yourself you will hurt yourself too.

Look at how much baggage you’re carting around.  See what you can jettison.

Travel light, travel with purpose.