The Story of the Tommee Tippee Cup

When I was a very tiny girl, I had a Tommee Tippee cup, just like the one pictured above.  It has a weighted bottom so that it always stands upright and won't tip over.  I loved that cup and can remember using it as a little girl.  Then my sister used it after me.  My mother, being rather sentimental about things, kept it for many years and when I had my first child, she passed it along to me.  It was a treasure of my childhood and I loved that my son was using it as I had so many years before.

The time came that our little family took a trip to Missouri to visit some friends.  We stayed in their lovely old farmhouse, sleeping on an iron bed in a wallpapered room that time seemed to have forgotten.  The Tommee Tippee cup made the journey with us as my son was only a little over a year old and just learning to drink from a cup.  One afternoon, after a drive to see the countryside with our friends, we stopped in a little town many miles from where they lived to have lunch.  As usual, the Tommee Tippee cup came in with us for our son to drink from during the meal.

It wasn't until hours later when we were nearly back to our friends house that I realized I had left the Tommee Tippee cup sitting on the restaurant table.  When I let everyone know I had forgotten it, it was decided that it was too far to go back and get it.  That should have been the end of the story.

As we went to bed that night, I could not stop thinking about the Tommee Tippee cup and as the night progressed, I became more and more distraught about it.  Hours of sleep were lost while I thought about this little pink plastic cup that had been mine as a child.  It was as though I'd lost my childhood.  I tossed and turned, fretted and worried.  I was really upset.  How was I going to get it back?  It seemed so important not to lose it.

Around 5:00 a.m., with the sky beginning to turn light outside, I began to realize through the grace of God, that I was losing an entire night's sleep over a stupid plastic cup, that it was just a thing, an object that in the larger scope of things had no real meaning.  And I was allowing the loss of this piece of plastic to ruin a good night's sleep and probably much more if I continued on the way that I was.  I remember praying about it and then falling into a sound, restful sleep.

On awaking later in the morning, it came out how upset I had been about forgetting the cup and about my losing sleep over it, but now I was able to say that it was ok and that it wasn't worth the long journey to try and recover it.

Many years later, the lesson about losing what was just a "thing" turned out to be of enormous importance.  In 1999, when our house burned down, it was so much easier to cope with because I had already learned the lesson of "things" versus what really mattered... the people and relationships of those around us, of putting our trust in God to see that all would be well.

This past Christmas,  as we talked about my desire to downsize my belongings, I told this story to my kids.  Then, for my birthday a few weeks later, one of my gifts was the Tommee Tippee cup that you see above!  So now, as I go through my belongings and work at downsizing, I have this cup sitting on my kitchen windowsill to remind me that it is all just stuff.  I can choose to let the stuff weigh me down, to run my life, to keep me awake at night worrying about it.  Or I can let it go and be free to live with focus on the things that truly matter.