We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The Cost of Holding On
Given Greg’s recent Twitter comments on the question of how we view what we own, we thought this article in the New York Times was particularly timely. What is the cost of holding onto things? As we accumulate more and more possessions, do we pay a price beyond the actual price tag? Although this piece is not written from a Kingdom perspective, there’s a lot of wisdom here.
From the article:
When a man named Andrew Hyde began an adventure in minimalism, he only owned 15 things. It eventually moved to 39 and now it sits around 60. It all started when he decided to take a trip around the world and sell everything he didn’t need. As Mr. Hyde noted on his blog, it changed his life after a brief period of befuddlement:
I’m so confused by this. When we were growing up, didn’t we all have the goal of a huge house full of things? I found a far more quality life by rejecting things as a gauge of success.
Image by Kevin Utting. Used in accordance with Creative Commons. Sourced via Flickr.
Category: General
Tags: Kingdom Living, Simplicity
Related Reading
How Judging Blocks Love
What keeps us from fulfilling the law of love that is exemplified by Jesus and laid out in the Scriptures (Matt. 22:39-40; Rom 13:8,10 Gal 5:14)? In a word, we like to pass verdicts. To some extent, we get our sense of worth from attaching worth or detracting worth from others, based on what we…
You’re Not a Pacifist Are You?
Jayel Aheram via Compfight Brian Zahnd wrote a great piece the other day on this topic. He contends that when he is asked this question, it often has the same flavor of the question, “You’re not a pornographer are you?” Why is this question so contentious among believers? Brian has some interesting ideas about it.…
7 Ways to Join the Kingdom Revolution
In the previous post, I introduced in short form the call to participate in the kingdom revolution that Jesus began. What does this mean for us today? Let me offer seven ways we are called to the Jesus revolution: When Jesus set aside the riches of his divine prerogatives and sided with the poor and…
The Call to a Cruciform Life
Jesus repeatedly taught that following him meant that one had to be willing to “pick up their cross daily and follow [him]” (Lk 9:23; 14:27). Picking up our cross is the centerpiece of following Jesus because this was the centerpiece of what Jesus was all about. The thematic centrality of the cross is also illustrated…
Costly Discipleship
Bob AuBuchon via Compfight Zack Hunt over at The American Jesus is doing a series of posts called “Blogmatics” in which he fleshes out the theological assumptions that inform his blog posts. A couple of days ago he discussed discipleship and the life that believers are called to in a post entitled Blogmatics: The Cost…
God and Our Political Platforms
Rachel Held Evans posted a blog today on the stir created when Democrats booed the passing of “an amendment to the party platform reinstating language that identified Jerusalem as the rightful capital of Israel and that referred to people’s “God-given potential” in its preamble.” Of course this fed into the belief that if you’re a…