Simplify

It has been so crazy around our house lately. We had the holidays, getting LM's room ready and TJ's bday, travel plans, etc. It has gone by so fast and yet so slow! We just want to hold our little boy and let him know that we are his forever family.
Anyway, the point of this post... Bro. Jack started a new sermon series this past Sunday. It is going to be about living a simple Christian life and what that means. This past week was an over view but the main point was that there is way too much noise in our lives. That includes our relationship with Christ. We can get so caught up in the things of our walk with Christ that we forget the basics of what it is about. We can over commit ourselves even to the church and neglect the main parts of our Christian life. Simplify is going to be the theme of our church this year. After church, TJ and I were talking about all of the noise in our lives and how we want to cut it all out. So we have adopted this as our theme as well. We have already gone through our closets and are getting ready to take a ton of stuff to the shelter. We really do not need those things they are just things. I never really realized how much stuff TJ and I have. We go through our stuff at least twice a year and donate lots but we still have more! Part of it is that we have both been working and don't have any kids. When we wanted something whether it was clothes or whatever, we just went and got it. We had way more than we needed. This really is the wrong way to live. I just cringe now thinking about how much more we could have done with that money that we wasted. Yes wasted. We could have donated it to so many different places and made a difference. We have been richly blessed and we had abundance. Yet we spent it on ourselves. How embarrassing is that?! Anyway, we do not want our son to grow up that way. We have already talked and come to some great conclusions about how we want to raise him. We live in such a materialistic area not to mention generation. In times when kids as young as 8 have Iphones and laptops, when parents try to be their kids friends instead of their parent, we just want more for our son. We want him to appreciate the things in his life and not take them for granted. This is going to be tough for us because this little boy is an answer to so many prayers. We have waited so long to have a son and it will be hard to tell him no. Not just hard for me and TJ but he is the only grandchild on my side of the family. My family is going to want to spoil him rotten. He deserves it after what all he has been through in his young life. But we do want him to know that things are not important. Here are a few of the ways that we have come up with to instill in him the importance of others and of giving rather than receiving.
1. Christmas-- this one is not an original idea. We heard about another family doing it and it made total sense to us. LM is going to only get 3 gifts for Christmas plus his stocking. Why? Because Jesus only got 3 gifts for Christmas-gold, frankincense, and myrr (I know I spelled them wrong but I cant spell). We also do not want to fall into the commercialism of Christmas. We want LM to know what Christmas really is and it is not about all the toys that you get or a list of things that you want. It is about the birth of our Christ. With out Christmas than we would not be saved.

2. TJ and I go through the whole house at least twice a year and take things to the Salvation Army. We want LM to do this too. But it is going to be up to him what goes and what stays. He is going to go through his own toys and decide what to give to others and what to keep. We will have him make the decision so that he takes an active roll in this and sees how good it feels to give rather than to get.

3. We also plan on taking him with us as we serve in the community and on our short mission trips. By getting to see his parents serve and by getting to serve right next to us as he grows, we are hoping that he will develop a sense of simplicity as well

There are several things that TJ and I have committed to doing differently this year. They are not resolutions. We never make those. These are things that we have committed to the Lord and know that in doing this we are pleasing Him and making Him known in our choices. We are so excited to see how God works in our lives this next year. We are excited to turn from this materialistic world and look to the gifts and over abundance that our heavenly Father has blessed us with! Pray for us as we begin this journey because it is not going to be an easy one but so worth it in the end.