Soul Munchies

A little over a week ago I referred to a new experiment and promised more details soon. Maybe it was a spiritual disciplines small group I’ve been a part of, or maybe it was Monkey Town, or maybe it was Present Perfect, or perhaps it was a combination of these three and many other factors, but D and I have been praying about living simply for a little over a month now. For me, the desire to live simply started at least 5 years ago – and then, sometime in 2007, I came across this book, which shares one woman’s journey in living simply. That desire has been deep in my heart ever since that time, but I didn’t have the dedication or the support to do anything with it.

D and I have decided it’s time to stop thinking and talking about living simply and just simply do it. So we’re embarking on a 90-day journey to get rid of the “stuff” in our lives and focus on God. We picked 90-days because we found a 90-day devotional that we are using together. Instead of sitting down in front of the TV after dinner each night, we will sit down with our Bible and devotional book and explore, pray, and talk with one another. We thought about what our essentials are and what “the extras” are. We came up with a list of things that we will either limit our purchase of or completely give up. We share them with you here:

• We will cancel our cable – TV has become one of the things that we obsess over and we have become slaves to certain shows. To be freed from this captivity, we will cancel cable so it is not even an option or temptation.
• We won’t buy any electronics – no computer accessories, no movies on DVD/blu-ray, no music downloads, no video games – if it uses some sort of electronic device to use it, we won’t buy it.
• We won’t buy any “junk food” – no cookies, ice cream, cakes, brownies, bagels, cinnamon rolls, cinnamon bread, frozen pizza, candies, popsicles, chips – if we want delicious snacks like these, we’ll make them at home – from scratch.
• We won’t buy any clothes or shoes unless we have a special occasion coming up that requires it (i.e. wedding).
• We will only go out to eat once a month – this includes ordering “to-go” food.
• We will only have 1 bottle of wine a week and only 1 bottle a month that isn’t “3 buck chuck”.
• We won’t make any coffee shop purchases (i.e. Starbucks, Caribou, etc.)
• We will limit our book purchases to 2 books/month – one for each of us.

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Although our purpose for this experiment is not “to save money” we are certain that saving money will be a positive result from the experiment. We are certain that we will end up with more free time, which means we will have time to read the many books on our shelves, listen for God’s voice, grow together as a couple, and so much more. We are also certain that it’s going to be hard – it’s not easy to go against the grain of society. Especially when fall tv kicks back up and everyone we know is talking about the latest hot show. Or when people invite us out to dinner but we’ve already planned our one night out. But we know, that no matter how hard it is, at the end of the 90-days, we will be glad we did it. We hope that at the end of 90-days our lives are so much more fulfilled that we continue the simplicity project for 90 more days, and then again, and again, and again.

We invite you to join us on our journey. We will write daily about our journey and share with you our joys and frustrations. We invite you to pray for us as we embark on this journey and to consider how you might join the Simplicity Project.

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