I don't think God needed me to give my stuff to that woman...I think He needed me to understand the depth of my privilege, the extent of my judgmental nature, and the reality that my heart truly is connected to the things I have spent my money on.
I somehow had the idea that rising above was synonymous with thinking highly of myself...that rising above meant giving myself a boost of self esteem.
Possessions. I don't even want to talk about this. I hold onto EVERYTHING.
Day two of the workshop wrapped up at 3pm and we decided to put down a deposit on a Tumbleweed trailer. When we left Madison that afternoon we said, "Ok God, if this is Your plan for us, we're ready." Two hours later we had an offer on the house. By Monday morning we had two offers. The house had been on the market for four days.
The decision to list the house had a few parameters on it. We would take it off the market if it hadn't sold by mid-June since I would be hugely pregnant by that time. We also agreed not to hide all the stuff that couldn't be out during showings. We are planning to downsize anyway, so the extra stuff had to go. It was a long week getting the house ready. We said goodbye to five pieces of furniture, over 200 pieces of clothing, and several household items.
We decided to jump forward to the possessions experiment (give away 7 possessions a day) and apply it to our clothes. For two weeks we had to get rid of 7 clothing items PER DAY (and since I can't deal with weird numbers we rounded up to 100 items each).
We have a love/hate relationship with taxes. The first year we were married we came out about even. The second year we owed $7,000. The third we overcompensated for the prior year by paying in extra on every paycheck at every job (Zac averages four jobs at all times) and got a $7,000 return.
I went back and forth on whether or not my family would participate in the food experiment. I had created a list of reasons as to why we were exempt from it: I am pregnant, we have a toddler (who eats like an adult), Zac works 24-hour shifts and needs to pack lots of food, so on and so forth.