What to keep?  What not to keep? What to keep and for how long?  These were once loose rules that we each made up for ourselves, but today, we can get in trouble for not keeping something long enough, or worse yet, for keeping something too long.  There are people who now make their living advising others on their records retention policies.  I grew up business-wise in the age of retaining. With the advent of the digital age we have gained with each year a greater and greater amount of available storage. The cloud and services like dropbox and box give even the smallest of businesses the chance to store and retain what never could have been kept before. There aren’t enough steel storage case cabinets available to handle what even one of us stores today digitally. But, is this a good thing?  Ask a lawyer and the answer will be no.  Whatever is available is discoverable.  Whatever is randomly stored or randomly deleted is suspect. Knowing the different is the key.  It behooves us to have a policy of record retention, follow and embrace it.  Ironic, but in this age of more availability , that less is still better.

Every now and then we can also benefit from a little cleaning out and inventorying what we are retaining in our lives, both figuratively and literally.  God gives us the opportunity to come into His presence and have Him clean out our pasts and the sins that keep us from the relationship with Him that He desires.  We should have our own personal records retention program with God where we meet with Him daily to allow him to remove and cleanse us of our sins so that as we move forward to bring Him glory we can do so fully.

Reference:  Exodus 29:43 (King James Version)