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Rooting Out Our Own Greed
Joshua Becker is a Christian who focuses on a lifestyle of simplicity on his blog Becoming Minimalist. He wrote a book called Simplify: 7 Guiding Principles to Help Anyone Declutter Their Home and Life as well as several other books on this topic. What is refreshing about Joshua’s take on this subject matter is the way that he highlights that a simpler lifestyle can be freeing and can help us to better focus on what is really meaningful in our lives, and he avoids the temptation to be legalistic or rigid.
On his blog today he challenged readers who are angry or discouraged about corporate greed and selfishness to start by examining the ways that they themselves have been selfish or greedy. While these qualities can seem obvious to us in corporations or those around us, it’s sometimes difficult to recognize them in our own hearts.
From the blog post:
Recognizing the negative effects of corporate selfishness is easy. But identifying our own selfish motivation is more difficult to accomplish. It is, after all, far more painful to discover and admit.
As a result, we rarely recognize how selfishness within us is…
- contributing to the feelings of jealousy we experience.
- causing strife in our relationships with others.
- negatively impacting our relationship with our spouse.
- motivating so many of the unhealthy decisions we make with our money.
- preventing us from meeting the apparent needs of others.
- keeping us from experiencing love, joy, hope, gratitude, generosity.
- hindering us from finding true contentment.
Image by David Ohmer. Used in accordance with Creative Commons. Sourced via Flickr.
Category: General
Tags: Greed, Simplicity
Related Reading
Podcast: Can Divine Simplicity Apply to a God Who IS Love and IS Relational?
Greg distinguishes practices from beliefs, and warns Christians about the evils of Christmas trees and shaking hands. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0353.mp3
Remembering that We are Finite
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Immoral TOHU wa BOHU
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Simple Holidays
Lawrence OP via Compfight Here’s a reflection from Joshua Becker on Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing During the Holidays. From the article: Surely, each of us will define our holiday most important differently. Many will seek spiritual renewal. Some will celebrate family. Some will refocus on giving to others. Some will seek rest. Some will…
The Cost of Holding On
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Becoming Unbusy
ZeroOne via Compfight Joshua Becker posted A Helpful Guide to Becoming Unbusy that we thought was wonderful. If you’re finding yourself mindlessly going from one task to the next with no time to take a breath, you might want to check this out. From Joshua’s post: But is the state of busy really improving our…