The Rest of the Sevens

(More posts with plenty of pictures from this past weekend with our wonderful guests will be coming soon, but for tonight I'm going to finish up a post that I've been working on sporadically for quite a while.  After I get it done, then I can turn my attention to other things.)  :)

Way, way back in May--which feels more like a year ago to me than only five months--I read the book 7: An Experimental Mutiny against Excess by Jen Hatmaker and was so convicted by it that I started writing a series of blog posts describing my thoughts about each of the seven areas Jen addressed--specifically, the changes I wanted to make as a result of what I had read.

Maybe you remember that.  Most likely you don't.  ;-)

I had planned to finish the series in June, but one thing after another popped up (June was full of those kinds of things: homeschool convention, Josiah's birthday, children's choir tour, etc.), and I didn't accomplish that goal.  It's been in the back of my head ever since, and now it's time to push it to the forefront so I can get this finished!  ("Finished" is such a lovely word.)  ;-)

If you're interested, you can read the series introduction here, the first of the seven here, and the second here.  Believe me, I had to go back and read those posts to remember what I had written!  ;-)

Rather than writing a separate post for each of the remaining five areas Jen wrote about, I'm going to lump all of these into this one post--mostly, so I can make sure that it actually gets DONE.  (Did I mention how much I love the word "finished"?)  ;-)  When I read this book in May, I jotted down some lengthy notes before I had to return the book to the library, so if you're wondering how in the world I'm coming up with all this stuff after so many months, that's why!  However, the length of time between me reading the book and me writing out my full response means that I won't be including as much detail as I did with the first two categories.  (But at least I'll be finished!)

Possessions

This area is really where it all started for Jen, since her impetus for making the radical changes she describes in this book was the comment someone, who was staying with the Hatmakers because of being displaced by a hurricane, made about how wealthy they were because of all the stuff they had.  And while I haven't had that exact situation happen to me, I can imagine how it could happen.  I can believe that there are vast multitudes of people who would take one look around our home and be astonished by all the things we have (and believe me, we're not considered wealthy by American standards, that's for sure!!).

So what do I do?

First, let me say that I would love to get rid of so much of our stuff.  Clutter drives me bonkers, and I routinely have the sensation of "drowning" in stuff.  But there are 6 other people who live in my house, and how much of their stuff can I get rid of (especially my children's stuff--not so much Jeff's stuff)?  ;-)  Plus, we don't know whether we'll have another child or not; and I'm extremely reluctant (and rightfully so, I think) to get rid of our baby clothes/toys/equipment, etc. until we know for sure that we won't have another...which might be a while down the road.  Even with things like the Thomas the Tank Engine stuff that the boys have spent hours enjoying but have now basically outgrown (except for the occasional time when they get out the tracks and build an elaborate set-up all over the floor of Tobin and Shav's room), I hesitate to get rid of it because another child might enjoy them someday.  I'm actually looking forward to passing along so many of the items that have brought us such pleasure--whether it be baby blankets, rattles, board books, clothes, or whatever--but I don't think that time is now.  As a result, I end up hanging on to a lot of stuff which then sometimes feels suffocating to me, but I don't know what else to do.

But let me also say that decluttering, on a small scale, is a constant, ongoing process for me; I have a box in the bottom of my closet that I regularly put things in to be dropped off at the thrift store.  But to tackle a major decluttering project takes a larger amount of time than I normally have (or decide to use in that way).  During the school year, in particular, I find that homeschooling leaves me little time for doing a huge spurt of decluttering; and so there are areas of my home that remain cluttered with possessions that should either be thrown away or given away--simply because of a lack of time to tackle the mountain of stuff.  I chip away at it, but sometimes it doesn't seem to be getting any smaller.

Another thought--perhaps the most important one in this area: with possessions, the first line of defense is to never let them into your home.  With that in mind, I have tried to become more aware, both when I add something to the shopping list or when I spontaneously consider buying something when out and about, of whether or not I truly need something.  If I don't, then the answer to "should I buy it?" is almost certainly no.

Media

Here's an area in which I can be tempted to rest on my laurels.  After all, we don't have a TV; I almost never go to the movies (maybe once a year?); I don't have a smartphone (or even a dumb phone...no cell phone for me!); I don't play games on Facebook; and so on.  But do I still end up spending too much time online?

Yes.  Yes, I do.

Most of my online time happens at night after the kids are in bed, so again I'm tempted to pat myself on the back because at least I'm not spending hours on Facebook when I should be paying attention to my kids, right?  But when I'm honest with myself, I realize and admit that I spend entirely too much time online, sometimes doing dumb stuff --like taking Facebook quizzes ("What flower are you?" and "What country of the world should you live in?" and "How Southern are you?" and "How much of a grammar nerd are you?"...if you're on Facebook, you know exactly what I'm talking about!)--and sometimes doing stuff that can be worthwhile but isn't the best use of my time--like reading random news articles or blog posts from various bloggers that I find because this person linked to that person and that person linked to another, etc.  It's not wrong to spend some time doing that, but how easy it is to let the minutes and hours tick by and have nothing useful to show for it at the end.

I know that my online activities are what keep me up too late at night and prevent me from getting as much sleep as I should; and I've discovered that, if I stay up late doing something productive (writing a blog post, organizing/editing pictures, writing something on my Facebook page about my mother's experiences with Alzheimer's Disease, sending emails, reserving books at the library, researching Christmas gifts for the kids, or any number of other necessary tasks), I might be tired the next day, but I don't mind too much because I know I used the time for worthwhile things.  But how dreary I feel when I've stayed up late, wasting time on stupid stuff!  I drag myself to bed, kicking myself all the way for the lack of self-discipline I showed by allowing myself to get sucked into mindless computer activities; and then I drag myself out of bed the next morning, kicking myself all over again for my poor choices.

Truly, I need to be mindful of how I use media because even if I'm not doing something overtly sinful with it, it can still be such a time-waster and brain-diminisher!  I don't have a specific plan for how to tackle this area of excess in my life--for my kids, we set an hour a day limit on computer time for them (excluding the time they use the computer for educational purposes), but I don't want to set such a rigid standard for myself because again, there are many ways in which I use the computer in very helpful ways.  But I guess the key for me is to be aware of how I'm using it and how much time is elapsing in the process...which is easier said than done, especially when I plop down at the computer in the evenings, feeling almost completely depleted of energy and half brain-dead as it is!

Waste

This is another area in which I see my successes first before my shortcomings, because the action steps Jen describes are things we already do and have been doing for years.  My mother, "who was green before green was cool" in the words of my friend Julie who has known my family for years, taught me to recycle...and to compost...and to burn what we could in the woodstove for kindling (so it wouldn't end up in a landfill and so we could get our fires started to heat our home).  In her younger years, Mother was known to wash communion cups so they could be reused, gather plastic cups from the trashcans after wedding receptions so they could be washed and reused, and even to pick up staples from the floor of my dad's office so they could be put in metal recycling.

While I am certainly not as extreme as my mother, I am fairly conscientious in this area; and between the way we give food scraps to the chickens or put them in the compost pile, the way we recycle plastics and metals and glass and cardboard and batteries and so on, and the way we burn trash in the woodstove (the trash that can burn, that is), there isn't as much waste that goes from our household to the landfill as most American homes would produce, I'm guessing.

But to be honest, I'm not the best at all of this when it isn't convenient.  For example, if my whole kitchen counter is covered in dirty dishes, and there is a steel can that had black beans in it, but it's been sitting there long enough to be dried out and hard to wash, I'll probably throw it away, rather than using the time and energy to clean it enough to recycle it.  Another area: I wash baggies and reuse them, but only if they're relatively clean to begin with.  If they were holding meat or other messy stuff, I throw them away without trying to clean them.

If I were going to push myself to improve in this area, I think it would have to be in the area of consistency: doing the recycling or reusing even when it isn't convenient.

Oh, and I just thought of another thing: it would be great if I could remember to take reusable shopping bags when I go to the store, but for some reason, I can never seem to remember them!  Maybe I should make that my goal: to remember to use reusable bags at the grocery store.  :)

Spending

What I spend most of my money on is food for our family and activities for the boys.  It is SO HARD to cut back in those areas--especially the boys' activities.  Sometimes I tell Jeff, "I'll cut anything else out of my spending, but I don't want to cut violin lessons!" (or choir or whatever).  And it's not because I'm a pushy mom who thinks her kids HAVE to be involved in those things, but they enjoy them, don't want to quit, and it's such a worthwhile thing that I would just about give my right arm to make sure they could continue.

So what can I change in this area?  Well, I can be more conscious of how much I spend for food and keep my eyes out for cheaper recipes that I can incorporate into my menu.  Also, like I've mentioned before, I don't realize how many times I think, "Oh, we need that.  I'll just go write it on the shopping list now."  It's an automatic response.  For example, at the beginning of the summer, I thought Moriah needed new summer pajamas and Shav needed new crocs.  But as it turned out, we got by just fine with the summer pajamas we already had for Moriah, and Shav is still happily wearing his old crocs!  :)

Stress/Rest

This is a topic that surely deserves its own post!  But let me see if I can summarize my (many!) thoughts about this.

I'm well aware that stress is a part of life and that my life, like so many others', includes too much of it.  I'm also aware that I don't get enough rest.  To address both of these issues, Jen discusses the issue of a Sabbath, a teaching that many who call themselves Christians completely ignore.

When I was still in college, one of my professors (Dr. Brensinger, if my memory is correct) taught about the Sabbath and how important that time of rest is for us even now in our culture, so the idea is certainly not new to me.  However, I did not succeed in making that a part of my life during my college days (Sunday evenings are for cramming, right?), and neither did I specifically institute that during the years since college.

For many reasons, I do not want to be legalistic about the idea of a Sabbath rest (and again, there is a huge iceberg of things that can be said about that, and I am only the Titanic, touching a tiny bit of it).  But I do want to consciously work to slow down the speed of my life so that I can receive the gift of rest.

One specific idea for how to do that is to eliminate all nonessential work from Saturday evening after my dates with Jeff until Sunday evening.  If you're familiar with Jewish culture, you already know that this roughly follows their pattern of sundown to sundown being the Sabbath; but in my case, I have a practical reason for following this basic pattern.  You see, Sunday evenings are such important times of the week for me, especially as I look ahead to the new week and prepare for all that is coming--homeschooling and so much more.  If I don't spend a little time "working" on Sunday evenings, I feel like I start Monday mornings already feeling behind, and it can take a while to catch up.  But within this loose parameter of resting from Saturday evening to Sunday evening, there is much flexibility about what that really entails!

May 18 was the first Sunday I consciously rested; and although there have been a number of Sundays since then that weren't particularly restful at all, the times when I did adopt a slower pace of life have convinced me of the value of pursuing this.  In the upcoming months, I anticipate Sunday afternoons having more time for playing games with my boys, reading to my kids, and other restful, bonding activities.  That's my hope anyway.  :)

In the end...

What have I learned through reading Jen Hatmaker's book 7?  How has my life really changed during the past five months?  Am I a different, better person as a result?  In what ways do I still need to be transformed?

Important, weighty questions--and of course, I don't have all the answers.  But when I think back to the day I first opened the book and started reading and then think about all the days since, I realize that probably the most significant, practical, real thing I did as a result of reading Jen's book was this:  I volunteered at a food pantry.

It's something I'd been wanting to do for years but had always put off.  Jen's call to action spurred me enough, however, that on May 16 I made the first call to inquire about serving in this way; and the result of that call was that all throughout the summer, every other week, Josiah, David, and I would go spend a couple hours on Wednesday afternoons helping at a food pantry.  When Josiah broke his arm and couldn't help, Tobin took his place, to his great delight; and the very last week we were able to serve before our Wednesdays-are-busy school routine started up, Shav even got to go along to help.

We unloaded boxes of food from trucks, we unloaded food from the boxes, we put food on shelves and in refrigerators and freezers, we repackaged sugar and flour and onions and carrots and rice and eggs and who knows what else, we broke down cardboard boxes and loaded them back on the truck, we straightened plastic bags and got them ready to be used, we got to know the people who serve in that ministry day in and day out, and best of all, we grew in our understanding of how life is for many people.  It was a small, but valuable, step along the path to not only raising children who look beyond themselves to meet the needs of others, but being that kind of person myself.

Being involved in that way was such a highlight of the summer that I was genuinely sad when we were no longer able to fit that into our schedule.  We hope to go back in the future, when our Wednesday afternoons aren't full.  I'm already looking forward to that.  :)

With that said, I do believe I have, at long last, come to the end of my report on The Sevens--but Lord willing, NOT to the end of the growth produced in me through the challenges found in that book.  As a matter of fact, I recently put it on reserve at the library again, just because I feel the need of a refresher course and a fresh jolt to put more of my self to death so that I can put on more of the character of Jesus.

I want to do nothing more than continue doing so until I walk through the doorway marked Death and into the glory of heaven!