In the Beginning . . .

It is the beginning of a new year. 2011 has passed and 2012 has come. Typically my wife (Alyssa) and I (Joshua) don't do big “resolutions” for the new year. We are both crtical of how impactful these actually are and tend to make “goals” for the upcoming months and have some good conversation about what we want to be "different" about our life as a couple and lives as individuals. We discussed several things: budgeting better to get out of student debt, slowing life down, concentrating on friendships and being present, and greater authenticity with each other, friends, and colleagues. But we also decided to do something unique. 

In November I was looking through the Free Methodist (the denomination we belong to) website and found an article by Jen Hatmaker called  'Tis the Season to Simplify . In the post she tells of her family's journey of eliminating/changing seven things in their life each month for seven months. She called it the Seven Experiment, utilizing a number of wholeness, order, completion, etc in the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The Hatmakers approach included the following elements:

Food
 We ate only seven foods.Clothes
 We wore the same seven items of clothing. No, I am not kidding.Possessions
 We gave away seven things a day that we owned.Media 
We took away seven forms of media, gaming and social networking, and imposed radio silence. The kids feigned aneurysms.Spending
 We spent money in only seven places. Waste
 We adopted seven substantial habits for a greener life, including gardening, composting, extensive recycling and buying only thrift or local.Stress
 We followed the “Seven Sacred Pauses,” pausing for prayer and worship seven times a day, in addition to observing the traditional Sabbath each week.

We are taking up this same basic format, but changing the order and adding technology to the media category. As we go we may make some adjustments before each month begins too.

Over the next seven months,  Alyssa and I will post about why we decided to do this experiment, how it is going, what we are learning, etc. We decided not to give a long explanation why we are doing this. This omission is for two reasons: 1) The title of the blog explains it, "Simpler Life" and 2) it takes too long to post why simplicity is valuable so we will just be posting about it throughout the seven months. Our post may not be daily and will vary in size, but we will try to be consistent so as people can stay in the loop.

We are humbly taking up this challenge because we think it is an important practical and spiritual exercise, but we don't expect to it to be easy and we will be honest when we have failures. We would love to hear your comments, questions, concerns, encouragements etc, so please post and vitually come on this journey with us.