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I stared at our refrigerator door trying to decide what to do. I wasn’t hungry, so I wasn’t trying to decide what to eat.

Practically the entire door, except for the handle, was covered by memories and messages. I knew I had to do something about all that stuff. Newspaper clippings, cartoons, school photos, and drawings hugged the door, held in their places by magnets of all shapes and sizes.

Sometimes I feel the clutter around my house grows while we’re sleeping or at work. At times, frustration with boxes and piles of stuff makes me determined to clean up. I’m thinking of making it seem like fun and planning a “throwing-away party,” if I can make myself part with it.

My life passed before my eyes as I sorted through the hodge-podge spread out on the kitchen table. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen the refrigerator door blank. Windex and a paper towel shined the appliance.

Then came decision time. What goes and what stays? Our daughter’s first-grade Sunday School drawing had to stay in the upper right-hand corner of the freezer door. It’s been a mainstay not just because it’s a construction paper tracing of her small hand; but also because of a little bow made of yarn, glued on her index finger and the crayon reminder, “Don’t forget to pray.”

Magnets on the opposite corners of the drawing had to stay – one says, “Prayer List,” and the other, an inverted heart, with the message, “Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.” Just under her drawing, I placed a little square magnet painted with flowers and a picket fence that reads, “Enter His gates with thanksgiving.” Some magnets seem to preach a sentence sermon, “If worry, why pray. If you pray, why worry.”

Beside that magnet, there’s another rectangular one with our daughter, Kelley’s, name, it’s meaning, and the verse, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in Him, and I am helped; therefore my heart greatly rejoiced, and with my song will I praise Him” (Psalm 28:7).

A larger square magnet featured a stick person drawn with a thumbprint for a body and affirming words, “You are thumbody in Him!” It fit in the upper right-hand corner of the lower door just under a magnet depicting a family of bears around a table praying, “God is grace God is good. Lettuce thank Him for our food. By this ham we are fed, give us, Lord, our raisin bread. Amen.”

I just couldn’t toss the Family Circle cartoon of a little girl singing, “I come from Alabama with a band-aid on my knee.” Under “Prayer List,” I lined up the photos of missionaries and prayer reminders from ministries like Sav-A-Life.

The pile of things I retired from the refrigerator door went into a file folder. Now I have to figure out where to place the sentimental items such as coloring sheets specially presented to Grandma Jan and Grampa Greg along with school photos. What I had dreaded doing turned out to be a trip down memory lane.

— Jan White has compiled a collection of her columns in her book, “Everyday Faith for Daily Life.”