Jason and I have been making a lot of changes over the past few months.  It all started with my frustrations of feeling like we are caught in a cycle of consumerism.  Constantly spending money and getting more stuff, yet never feeling satisfied.  Throwing away more food than we eat some weeks.  Wasting time on things that are meaningless.  Feeling like the house is a constant disaster no matter how hard we work to keep it clean.  Lots of stress.  Of course with Jason working full time, me working part time, and a baby to tend to, there is a lot of work and busyness.  But I knew we could be doing things better.  Spending less, wasting less, stressing less.  Spending time and energy on things that are important and lasting.

Jen Hatmaker agreed, and happened to write a book called 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess.  In her book she discussed how she gave up food, clothes, spending, media, possessions, waste, and stress.  The book came out in January and I read it in about 10 days (a record for me, since I have sworn off reading since Pharmacy School).  It had an immediate impact on me, though it has taken some time for me to digest and apply to my (our) life.  I walked away from the book being reminded how blessed we are and it helped me truly understand how little some people have.  Living in the area that we do we see people who have bigger houses, nicer cars, better clothes, and more extravagant lifestyles than us.  And we want it too.  We tell ourselves we need it.  We rarely see homeless people who need a place to sleep (and when we do we question whether they are really homeless or just make more money standing on the side of the road).  We don’t see the mommas who need to feed their children.  And we surely don’t see any of the 147 million orphans worldwide who need love from parents.

Our goals are as follows:

1. Spend less money.

2. Have less stress in our lives.

3. Fill ourselves with what is important.

The changes we have made so far our (I will post about each one separately).

1. Cancel our cable.

2. Meal planning.

3. Simplifying our eating (no processed or canned food).

4. Limiting our eating out to once a week individually and once a week together.

5. Having a very strict budget (for me at least, I am the spender of the family!).

6. Be very organized (shopping lists, to do lists, cleaning schedules).

7. Be intentional about spending time with our friends and church family

I want to journal and share what changes we have made and how much better our life is because of it.  Though I probably won’t share a lot of specifics from the book, I highly recommend reading it!