So many good and useful, not to mention actionable admonishments in this 31-day devotional by T.C. Spellen! Yesterday she talked about de-cluttering your life and today she spoke of living simply.
Clutter is something that can build up quickly and seemingly out of nowhere! I know this first-hand because I live in a small apartment with two grown children. We don’t have a storage locker, and very little storage areas in the actual apartment itself. This means that periodically, we go through the place and make a run or two to the local thrift store, because we’ve either a) outgrown something, b) don’t use it anymore, c) forgot we had it and don’t see a use for it, etcetera. This keeps the clutter at bay, for the most part.
But then there is clutter caused by daily living. The laundry may not get folded for a few days. The deep freeze becomes a catch-all countertop. We develop “corners” as I like to call them. My daughter has two “corners” in our bedroom, and sometimes they stretch into “walking space” causing me to trip over them in the dark. My son has a big “corner” right in the middle of his “walking space” in his bedroom that gets cleaned up or moved when Christmas time comes around and his bike has to sit in his bedroom. I have taken over a corner of the couch as an extension of my home office and the one place where I put my work bag, purse, choir binder, sheets that need to be filed, magazines, etc.
As I look around the house, I can see that we are in need of another round of de-cluttering, quite decidedly. My own desk requires de-cluttering periodically as well. As Spellen says, when a home is free of clutter, a person can think better, experiences less stress and anxiety, and finds it easier to rest.
The fact yesterday’s session was placed right next to today’s session on living simply was clearly by design and I applaud the author for doing this. In today’s materialistic society, even people in the Church still think they need the latest and greatest, the biggest and best, and to even hint at suggesting their standard of living is too high is enough to get gasped and huffed at.
In addition to the benefits Spellen mentions in her devotional, my kids and I have found that living simply positively impacted our health and outlook on life as well. For us however, it hasn’t been a case of needing to downsize how we live, quite the opposite in fact, as we have not had the money to splurge very often or on very much. The financial demographic I have raised them in, is known as “the working poor”. We are “low-income” and have learned many things about how to make a dollar stretch farther than most people think it can go! We haven’t been able to afford pop and chips whenever we felt like it. We haven’t been able to throw chocolate bars and cookies into the grocery cart for use in lunches and break-time snacks. We haven’t had the money to pay for monthly cable television or stay current with the gaming and phone gadgets out there. But far from feeling gipped or left out, my kids have grown up not comprehending why people need all that stuff! It’s pleasantly amazing to hear them talk about how spoiled their friends are, about their dismayed amazement at the lifestyles people choose to live who then complain about how expensive everything is. I’ve run into this myself with people who try to identify with us, who have mortgage payments, go on vacations twice a year, eat out once a month and pay for cable television. I shake my head because their issues are due to having chosen a higher standard of living which really isn’t necessary to their personal survival or that of their family. If they had the same level of income, but lived in our circumstances otherwise, they’d have more money available than they knew what to do with. But their chosen standard of living sucks it out of them and they think they’re living broke.
The North American lifestyle unfortunately promotes that kind of living however. I’ve actually had family members accuse me of living third-world, precisely because we aren’t living up to the North American standard of living. But to be bluntly honest dear reader, the North American lifestyle is overrated, overpriced, and the very reason many of our people are stressed out, suffer anxiety attacks, succomb to cancer and a whole myriad of illnesses, suffer mental and emotional breakdowns, snap, and more! When Scripture talks about abundance, material abundance is rarely intimated. Rather it’s abundance of life in Christ, abundance of life among family in and out of the church, abundance of treasure in Heaven, etcetera. This isn’t to say God frowns on material abundance, but the examples of healthy material abundance given in Scripture shows us men and women God gifted to earn the funds that would be used to advance His Kingdom here on earth! So many who teach the North American prosperity gospel forget that God’s idea of abundance works anywhere in the world, while the western concept of abundance only works in the western world and in so-called highly civilized societies. Material abundance in the prosperity gospel, is used as a measure of God’s blessing and annointing on a person’s life. This is wrong on every count possible! God blesses those with material abundance who will be wise with it and generous. Scripture tells us that to whom much is given, much is required. Scripture also says that if we are faithful in few things, we will be made faithful in much. Therefore, God knows how much a person can handle, and sadly, whether due to lack of self-control or lack of teaching against the modern consumer culture, most people can’t handle their wealth very well. They squander it on debt payments, maintenance budgets, and on things that can’t be passed on either to those extending the Kingdom of God, or the next generation for whom an inheritance used to be set aside.
It honestly isn’t necessary to live the way most North Americans do, in order to be healthy, happy and productive in today’s society. However this does go against popular thinking and modern cultural perspectives. The observation is made every time a person comes home from a short-term missions trip, or even sometimes by longterm missionaries coming home on furlow, “They have so little and yet they are so happy!” No one seeks to connect the dots! Why are they so happy with so little? They don’t have the stress of maintaining expensive possessions. They don’t have the anxiety created by needless accumulation of goods and clutter. Their health is not threatened by the convenience of processed instant foods. They don’t need things to be happy. They don’t need things to be restful. They don’t need things to feel secure.
What about you? Are you willing to buck the North American lifestyle?
