Excess

I've recently been reading a book called "Seven" by Jen Hatmaker. Jen's husband pastors a church in Austin called Austin New Church and they have radically changed their lives in the past several years to focus less on THEM and more on OTHERS! Simple concept, right? The problem is that this is foreign in our culture and takes sacrifice, and that is what she writes about in Seven. Over Seven months Jen (and her family for most of the months) take a challenge to consume less and give more...it is so beyond inspiring!

In month one she narrows it down to seven FOODS that she can eat the entire month! She chose chicken, eggs, whole wheat bread, sweet potatoes, spinach, avocados, and apples. Her food choices and mine would be a bit different (haha!) but the point is that a month she experienced what it would be like to only have access to Seven foods and even how simple and yet complicated it made her life. All I could think of is how many people in the world would give anything to have the assurance that they too could eat as many of seven foods as they wanted for a month. Most of us don't ever worry about going hungry, but instead we complain about our options for restaurants in a 10 miles radius of our home.

She also dedicates a month to:

Month 2- only wearing seven items of CLOTHING (other than undergarments :P)
Months 3- getting rid of seven POSSESSIONS per day in their home
Month 4- cutting out seven sources of MEDIA (TV, gaming, Facebook/Twitter, iphone apps, radio, texting, internet)
Month 5- creating seven habits to cut out WASTE... Gardening, composting, recycling, driving only one car, shopping thrift/2nd hand, buying only local.
Month 6- limiting SPENDING money in only seven places! She chose a farmer's market, HEB gas station, online bill pay, Target, Emergency medical, kid's school, and a limited travel fund.
Month 7- Elimintinating STRESS by pausing to observe "Seven Sacred Pauses" to take "breathing spells for the soul" and cut out stress in our lives. She takes Seven pauses in her day to pray and focus on a specific area. They also observed Sabbath from Saturday evening to Sunday evening.
An excerpt from Jen:
"I'm guessing many of you've cried over orphans or refugees or starvation or child prostitutes, heartbroken by the depravity of this world. It's not okay that you're kids get school and birthday parties while Third World children get abandoned and trafficked, but you don't know how to fix that..."

"Perphaps this is why Scripture calls us to the practice or fasting-from food, from greed, from selfishness, from luxuries. It isn't just the experience; its the discipline. It changes us. Fasting helps us develop mastery over the competing voices in our heads that urge us towards more, towards indulgence, toward emotional volatility. Like consistent discipline eventually shapes our children's behavior, so it is with us. Believe it or not, God can still change us. Not just our habits but our hearts. Say "no" for a year and see for yourself."

I have been chatting with Trevor and Quinn about this book a lot over the last month or so and it is so incredibly convicting....I mean seriously, we are so ridiculously blessed. We have soooo much and we somehow forget to be thankful every moment of every day...crazy, I know! We have been talking about ways we as Americans can in some small way feel what it would be like to live without all of this excess, but the truth is that we can't possibly TRULY know what it's like while living in this country... our society is all about excess! However, we can look for ways to implement this into our lives and can train ourselves to focus less on ourselves and the things that our families WANT or DESIRE and focus more on other peoples NEEDS who do not have the luxury of "wants". This is a GREAT read and I highly recommend it!