Experiments in Free

At our church, we don't do small groups.  The language and culture of those groups had grown too bulky and loaded for what we hoped to provide at Vintage, so we instituted a different approach, which we have dubbed "Experimental Collectives."  In these gatherings, we choose a topic and attempt to DO things to learn instead of reading something and talking about it and forgetting it.

Much of our work is based on the ideas presented in our friend Mark Scandrette's book Practicing the Way of Jesus.  Sometimes we fail in our attempts, but the process of trying has proven to be incredibly bonding and also much more transformative.   Typically, we gather for 5 to 6 weeks and aim for a high level of commitment and involvement.  We take a break for a few weeks or a month and then start new groups related to major themes that our community values:  Authenticity, Simplicity, Freedom, Purpose and Community.  We have done many interesting experiments over the years, and when Mark and his wife Lisa wrote a book about finances, it became an excellent series in both simplicity and freedom.  The book is called Free: Spending your Time and Money on what Matters Most.     This was our second time to utilize the book in ExCos since we have many new people who have not experienced it.

I don't know if you can imagine inviting a group of people into your life and allowing them to see your actual budget, records of how you actually spend your time, and piles of stuff you purchased, saved, moved, dust and ultimately realize you don't need, but it is humbling and amazing at the same time.  This group had amazing chemistry and was so brave in their involvement.  And as is always the case, we got out of the experiments what we put into them.  There was a genuine sense of sadness as we finished last night, culminating the series with a focus on how we could continue to free ourselves up to be as generous as possible.  This is always an energizing idea to me as I move past wanting to be in a good financial position simply for the sake of feeling security as other Christian financial plans seem to focus on.

As we have entered the Lenten season, our family was influenced by Free to attempt to give up meat for Lent.  Some parts of this have been surprisingly easy:  it seems that I can start dinner later and make dinner faster without defrosting any meat from the freezer.  It is certainly cheaper as we bypass the deli section, frozen chicken breasts, seafood, tuna, etc.  We are eating more vegetables than we did before.  I'm admittedly already a bit tired of cheese, which I never thought I would say.  Charleigh is really over having mushrooms show up in seemingly everything.  As I think and plan for the coming weeks, I am daunted by how many menu slots I will need to fill, but I try to focus on a one week at a time and enjoy choosing seasonal, fresh food to build meals. We break our Lenten fasts on Sundays and celebrate at restaurants with our friends, which breaks up the monotony and makes us much more grateful for our food than we have been in the past.

This is our new favorite quiche recipe, which we have made several times now (including for our potluck last night) without the bacon.  It is extremely tasty and easy to make and our whole family likes it.

If you are longing for a change but feel stuck, or would just like to test-drive a new idea or practice, consider gathering some friends to join you in an experiment.  As Christians, we are motivated to try to love people better by becoming healthier people, but if you are not religious, it is still easier to make changes with the help and energy of friends.  Our lives have so much more dimension when we try new things with people who are with us.  Want to read more about ExCos?  I wrote about them before here and here. 

The Game is ON

Experiments are afoot again at Vintage Fellowship.  This time around, I decided to sit out and focus on some other areas of my life that needed tidying up.  My boys...husband Robb and son Vin, are taking full part of the Game On collective.  This group is focusing on healthy eating, sleeping, water-drinking and bad habit elimination.  Two teams formed to compete against one another to out-healthy the other.  Even though I'm not formally participating, meals have been pretty different around here, and I got a good water bottle to help myself try to drink water.  I would say "more water" but I had gotten to a point where I pretty much was only drinking coffee in the morning and red wine at night and nothing else. Having experienced hydration for maybe the first time in my adult life, I have to say, I was really unhealthy!  It is a new sensation for me to experience "thirst."  I simply never felt that before.

Robb, after taking a month off from social media, is back to his blog and posted about his experiences so far on this healthy living plan.  Here's what he wrote:

I decided that Sunday morning is the best time for me to have my weekly weigh in. Last Sunday, I stepped on the scale, and I was down 7.5 pounds. Woohoo! Yeah me!
This accomplishment gave me so much confidence to head into week 2 strong. I had another perfect week – sleep, water, exercise, vegetables, the whole shooting match. Yesterday morning, I stepped onto the scale to chart my progress, hopeful to hit a milestone for which I was aiming.
And … nothing.
Exactly the same as the last Sunday.
All those vegetables. All that running. All those bottles of water. All for naught.
The number was the same.
As a metrics guy, this was really discouraging to me. My mind started to race, searching for reasons. Had I eaten too much during my Friday night cheat meal? Was is the last bottle of water I drank before going to bed Saturday night? Had I been unwittingly miscalculating my portions?

What do you do in times like this? Of course, I googled it up on my google machine. Apparently, this is a thing. The second week of a diet is often the worst week. Week 1 is when you drop all the water weight. Week 3 is when you begin a slow and steady slope toward your goal. Week 2 is the bump in the road. In fact, most people actually gain weight in the second week of a diet. I don’t watch the show, but apparently on The Biggest Loser, this is known as “The Curse of Week 2.”
This is the reason so many people quit dieting. They get discouraged when they see the number on the scale. They think it’s not working. And they give up.

Read the rest of the post and his reflections on it here.

How I Sin with a Broken Coffee Maker

It's All Too Much 
As Lent draws to a close on Sunday, I will be free again to buy clothes. It was a weird to thing to give up for Lent, but I came to the realization that each week, I would shop at the thrift store and pick up a new pair of shoes or a sweater, a new skirt, or something. Granted, nothing cost more than five or six dollars at the most, but the steady stream of stuff coming into my house had my husband saying things like "I don't even recognize your clothes any more" and "those Potter's House price tags are everywhere!" What was worse is that I often don't try clothes on in the store and end up with stuff I don't actually like that much after all. I buy it thinking "I should try some of those more modern styles" and end up hating the way they look on me. So not only have I brought in more stuff, I don't even really like it or wear it more than once or twice.
 
I was also stressed out by my vintage stock closet as it was overflowing with items I had purchased months ago and never gotten around to photographing and listing. It was hard to maneuver in there. I broke a lamp because it was stacked too dangerously on other things.  Helping my friend Holly with her organizing business project added to my mental nausea for stuff.
 
And then there was our last experiment at Vintage. The one where we dealt with this:




Yeah for Us!?
My friend Holly and I led the Experimental Collective that was in charge of getting rid of the stuff we all donated during the previous simplicity experiment. We spent our six weeks together sorting the pile of stuff that was donated and educating ourselves about our stuff... why we have so much of it and how it affects us and the community and world in which we live. We learned about good thrift stores and better thrift stores. And we forced ourselves to face the facts about where stuff goes after we donate it. We held a garage sale and stocked a flea market booth which continues to generate funds. We raised more than 600 dollars which we used to fund four Kiva micro-loans (which will likely be re-paid so we can re-circulate those funds) as well as helping two local families in need.  Yeah for us, right?



 
But.   
We also have two broken coffee makers that were donated (one of them was mine). If we just throw them in the trash, we are throwing away various kinds of metal and plastics that could be recycled.
 
But if we just recycle them, many recycling companies actually sell this kind of thing off to companies in China that will pick out the good parts of metal and then burn the rest, creating extreme super-toxins that pollute the air, water and dirt.
 
So we have to find a recycling company or program that will do it ethically, and that takes time. And even when we do donate those broken coffee makers to them, there will still be environmental problems getting rid of every single part of those broken coffee makers. There is no such thing as 100 percent recycling.

Screw the Environment 
Based on what I read on Facebook, many of my Christian friends don't care that much about what happens to these coffee makers. Some are brazen enough to say that because the environment is important to political liberals, they are not only free to ignore the environment, but also gleefully participate in gobbling up resources "just to screw with liberals." They claim that humans couldn't possibly ruin the world because God made it. I used to believe that too. Until I realized that Jesus was crucified at the hands of people. God himself was murdered by human beings. And if we could pull that off, we could also probably do some serious damage to creation as well. Just the other night, I was watching a comic who would offend many with his choice of language, especially when imitating God himself. But the gist of his shtick was, "If you really believe God made the world, why in the world would you be treating it the way you do?"  The truth is that Americans have a sick consumption problem that leads to an even sicker sanitation problem.  Christians can throw liberals the bird all they want, but landfills aren't getting any smaller or healthier. (And also, great job with the loving people and being citizens of the kingdom. "The world is not my home" but America needs to be as comfortable for me as possible apparently.)

Where it All Goes
The stuff we couldn’t sell at the garage sale and flea market booth...that went to a thrift store. It was a good thrift store which uses it’s profits locally to run job training and mentoring programs. But if they can’t sell the clothes (and only about 30 percent of the clothes Americans donate end up on other Americans), they will be sold to other agencies. Those agencies will take the clothes and bale them into giant bundles that get shipped across to the ocean to countries like those in Africa. The clothes will be sold to merchants there who will sell the clothes to locals who want to wear "American" clothes, which were probably made in China or India. Because the people can now buy cheap American second-hand clothes, their own local seamstresses and tailors cannot afford to sell their own work, and their local economy is being negatively impacted.

Catch 22
You see, even when we try to do the right thing, we still fail. We can never recycle everything we consume. We raised money for the poor from stuff we didn't even want. I was leading the group, driving around for weeks with garbage bags full of clothes I was too ashamed to bring inside the buiding to let the team sort. I buy almost all of my clothes from thrift stores, but I consume thoughtlessly.  Yesterday I spent hours of my life by my toilet trying to replace cheap plastic parts with more plastic parts so that I can have cleaner water in my toilet bowl than most people in the world have to drink. Those cheap plastic parts were purposely made to fail eventually so that I will have to buy more cheap plastic parts. I live in the free-est country in the world, but my government will make choices today that will frustrate me and oppress me and fail to operate in my best interest. I adopted one beautiful little girl, but how many little girls in the world today have no home and family? I can't go back to not knowing what I know now. I can never go back to thinking the environment, orphans and justice are not my problem. But I also am only one person. What can I possibly do? 

Exodus
We have been studying the book of Exodus. At Vintage. As a family. I feel like I have internalized this book in a way that is hard to explain. I'm living it. Finding myself in the story...I am both oppressed and oppressor.

God brings the Children of Israel to the foot of Mt. Sinai and reiterates his covenant with them. But the people are afraid of the mountain. It is too big. To rumbly. Too scary.  God requires so much. They push Moses ahead and say, "You talk to God for us. If He talks to us, we'll die." God offers them a covenant and they say "thanks, but no thanks."

We do that now too. We push Jen Hatmaker, John Piper, John MacArthur, our pastors to the front...."You wrestle with these issues. Tell us what God says so we don't have to deal with God ourselves. We'll just do what you say."   The problems are so big. We don't know what to do about them. So we'll just pretend they don't exist. We reject the New Covenant. What is the New Covenant?  It's the Covenant that Jesus offers. The one we reflect on this very week. 

It's the deal Jesus makes with us:   

"I'll take the fact that you can't even get rid of a broken coffee maker without hurting other people and the world I made, and you take my grace and forgiveness."  

Any illusions I have about saving the world have been shattered by the realization that I am part of the problem. And yet, as one who has been offered grace and forgiveness, I have no choice but to try.  I bring my little loaves and fish and let Jesus do the multiplying. I participate in small ways and learn bigger ways.  As Maya Angelou so sweetly put it, "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."