A Move Towards Simplicity

I just love the way the Lord confirms the stirrings He's put in our hearts. After my post "Simplicity or Sephora" a few weeks ago, I felt very compelled to do something specific regarding fostering simple living in our lives. I've had an extreme burden and desire to get rid of the clutter and excess to make room for new things the Lord might want to bring us. But let me be clear - I'm not talking about material things. The Lord has blessed us with so much and that abundance (mixed with a bit of stuff we've accumulated on our own) is just too much to manage. It takes time and energy and mind space. I feel He wants to bring us divine appointments and knowledge and we must create physical and spiritual "space" in our lives for those things. So I'm starting to clean house. More literally in the physical sense but also in the spiritual sense as well.

I've kept these things in my heart for the past month. Besides what I shared in that post, I've not really spoken to anyone about it. Not even my husband (and let's be honest, he doesn't really keep up with my blog). So you can imagine my surprise when he shared with me on Christmas that he felt the Lord saying we needed to be more "efficient and effective" in 2009 (thank you PD for our tendency towards alliteration!). I was so excited to know that God was impressing the same things upon his heart. I walked away from that conversation feeling like I really needed to do something drastic in order to keep myself accountable to this task. I have to admit, I felt (and still do feel) nervous about committing to anything specific but I believe it's time for me and for our household to get serious.

And then lastly, our pastor shared this past Sunday that he wanted to encourage us to "live lean" (there's that alliteration again) in 2009! Wow, what confirmation! I knew then that a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do!

So here I go . . . today I introduce to you "Project Simplicity 2009." Each week I plan to share one before and after project from our home where I get rid of clutter and excess. I plan to start small and work my way up to the big things. I will likely give items to Good Will or someone in our lives that could use some extra dishes or baby clothes. Hey, I might even get brave and try one of those crazy, mommy consignment sales and make a few bucks to contribute towards our family vacation. I'm not quite sure what it will look like exactly but the idea is to take baby steps towards a lean, efficient and simple life. I'm going to go ahead right now and say it might be hard to come up with 52 projects so I'm going to let myself off the hook right now and say perhaps it won't be every week, but I'm committed to giving it a try. And I will at least address the issue once a week even if I don't have a project to share.

My hope is that this will create a new way of living in our lives and perhaps encourage you in this way as well. We all really do have so much more then we need. What would our lives look like if we got rid of all the stuff and focused on what really matters? I'm hoping to find out!