Fruitful Words

Money spent

• $1.00 for a blueberry glazed doughnut at church. I don’t really like doughnuts, but I didn’t leave enough time to eat a proper breakfast before leaving the house. I am house sitting and I used breakfast time to feed the animals and water the garden.
• $5.00 to add to the pot for a gift. One of my seminary profs (who also happens to be the director of the Sacramento Western seminar campus) graduated with his PH.D. We had a surprise reception for him today.
• $49.68 to fill up my gas tank! I’ll see how long I can make this tank last.

So for today, I overspent by $1.00.

Cumulative total overspent: $1.00.

Read over this past week’s experience and journal to see what’s up.

Please share what’s been going on in your life too.

Yep, they are free this week. Really. So go ahead and partake.
Okay, they are ALWAYS free, but go ahead and take ‘em anyway.

Read here to see what I’ve been grateful for.

And you?

If you want to see how I’m doing with the 30 Days of Nothing, check here and here for my gratitude journal.

Have a looksee here and here.

I just posted under the 30 Days of Nothing link on the right side of the blog.

Lots of great conversations about this 30 day challenge happening in blogland.

Tonia’s original post is here.

Follow-up info is here.

Doodah has thrown down the gauntlet here and wrtitten on a related moral issue here.

Mary posts her ideas about this lifestyle reflection challenge too.

I haven’t had time to fully think about my direction. But I do know I want to use up what I have and learn to be more content with what I have.

How about you? Have you thought about how excess commercialism affects, directs, influences your daily life? Would you share?

Tonia at Intent recently shared a radical proposal: 30 Days of Nothing.

It’s not what you think.

While sitting around doing nothing sounds appealing this is an even better idea. Tonia, her family and many others are doing a 30 day fast from consumerism.

Tonia writes, “For 30 days, my family will buy nothing except our basic necessities. No clothes or books. No movies, no trips to the ice cream parlor. No paper, or pictures, or magazines. No fancy hair gel or take-and-bake pizza. Lattes? Nope. Nothing except what it takes to live.”

Why do this?
“The goal of this month-long fast is to break the grip of materialism in our hearts and minds. We want to live in gratitude, not discontent; and we want to live with awareness of the great responsibility our affluence has laid on our shoulders.”

Not only is this a gratitude/simplicity exercise, it is a social one as well. In this post Tonia exposes some of the huge gaps between how well the western world lives compared to most everyone else.

Click on over to Tonia’s site
If this sounds intriguing check it out. Starting September 1, I’ll be part of 30 Days of Nothing! Let me know if you are doing nothing too so we can share our experiences.