Simplicity: How to Balance it With Stewardship

How can I be a good steward of God gives me and still live simply?

We all know that more stuff is more complicated. But what of our good stewardship over what we are given? What about being frugal and saving things for a later use?

Ginger mentioned in the last post how many clothes are given to her. We are blessed in the same way. We are given so many wonderful clothes that we rarely need to buy any. But, what if you simply have too many? Honestly, I really struggle to get rid of perfectly good clothing. If you have someone to pass them along to, that may be a good answer.

I have a plan…

As I wait in our temporary home and plan how to keep our lives simple now that we are starting with a fresh slate, I have a plan. Perhaps it will inspire you to do something similar.

I’ve heard suggestions of the large family clothing dilemma go something like: “Save each child a play outfit, a couple of dress outfits and a few things in between, and get rid of the rest”. Sounds good at first, but I can’t do it. What happens when those few things get stained or torn? What happens when they grow out of them? Back to the store to BUY new ones when we just gave away perfectly good clothes.

So…I’m planning the “Crawford Thrift Store”. We have an extra room in our basement. Once our home is rebuilt, I plan to outfit this room with clothing racks, shelves and places for shoes. I will THEN give each child only a few outfits and shoes to keep up with. I will put any surplus in the “store”, keeping it locked and only accessing it as needed. Anticipating the same “disposable mindset” I mentioned in the last post from knowing there is an abundance of clothes behind the door, it has crossed my mind to require a child to buy new shoes or clothing from our “store” if he lost them due to carelessness. To me, this is the best of both worlds. Rooms with lower maintenance, good stewardship of what is given, and the chance to teach our children the value of money.

This concept could be applied to most items that seem to multiply in your home.

Two Important Questions

In other “stuff” areas besides clothing, Tsh Oxenreider, author of Organized Simplicity, says to ask yourself two questions regarding every item in your home:  ”Is it useful?” and “Is it beautiful to some member of our family?” If the answer is “no” to both questions, get rid of it.

She also suggests taking inventory of things like kitchen utensils. Isn’t it better to have one really quality skillet than trying to store six cheap ones? Clean out, have a yard sale, and spend that money on some quality tools.

Getting rid of it or finding a good place for it for later use will free up our time, our energy and even our “emotional clutter”, giving us more room for REAL living.

Simplify: Less Really is More

There is so much irony in prosperity. Prosperity is often the enemy of simplicity. Prosperity breeds apathy. And as it relates to our stuff, it creates in us a disposable attitude.

If you live in America, you make up the top 6% of the wealthiest in the world. The majority of the world’s inhabitants don’t have running water or electricity. The MAJORITY.

Contrast that with us…a people who have such an abundance of things that thrift stores and yard sales are an American icon while many countries can’t fathom such. (I’ll never forget the summer my parents first began keeping foreign students. We had a yard sale and the teen, Russian boys could NOT figure out what we were doing or why.)

We are a culture that idolizes more stuff, more gadgets, more everything. We are “stuff gluttons” (and still claim we can’t afford more than two children, which will forever baffle me).

The phenomenon caused by too much stuff is that we don’t value any of it. I’ve often wondered how “once upon a time” each child in a family only had one pair of shoes.  My children lose shoes constantly. And then I realized that if you only had the one pair they would mean something to you. They would be valued.

Applying this concept to our lives as families really changes the way we should look at our things, our activities and our choices. Everything becomes disposable–devalued–when we have too much of it. Even vacations and recreation lose their luster when we are engorged with them.

So we end up stressing ourselves out with more things that we value less to take care of, more activities eating up our time and money, the physical and financial stress of it all and in the end, we are only more busy, not MORE happy.

Simplifying begins with getting real about our priorities in life and saying “no” to the things that detract from those.

I want to challenge you to take inventory with me. Inventory of our things, our activities and our pursuits. De-cluttering our lives means bringing back value and enjoyment. Less IS more.

Simplify Your Life: It’s Time to Get Intentional

Simplicity.

Ahhhh….we all want it, or say we do. So much that the word itself has become overused, trite and meaningless.

Do you know what it really means? Do you know how significantly in can change your life?

Even before the storm, I had a strong urge to simplify.  Meaning, at the time, “get rid of stuff”. Because whether or not we realize it, stuff complicates our lives and robs our time. More stuff means we need more places to put it. It means we must clean up our stuff, take care of our stuff, spend money on our stuff or something to put our stuff in.

I’ve half-way joked that “there’s nothing like an F5 to help you pare down”

But when I randomly ordered a book called Organized Simplicity, I had no idea how the author’s words would meet the desires of my heart and cause me to see simplicity in a whole new way–in a life-changing way.

Simplicity isn’t just getting rid of stuff, though that’s a good start. It’s about living intentionally…deliberately.  YES! Without intentional living, we’re not really living, we’re allowing life to sweep us along, taking us places we don’t want to go, robbing us of time well-spent and ultimately robbing us of our deepest need–PEACE.

Organized Simplicity challenged our family to craft a “family purpose statement”. Before you think that sounds cheesy, hear the point:

With a stated, agreed upon purpose, you can begin to evaluate every decision, every activity and opportunity in light of your purpose. Because the reality is, we CAN’T do everything. So, unless we intentionally choose the things that best fulfill our “purpose”, our time will be robbed by the lesser things, ultimately diminishing our very quality of life.

Example: suppose one of the things in your family’s purpose statement is “more time for relationships”. Friday you are invited to a Tupperware Party. You have also been wanting to have the new neighbors over for a while. In light of your statement, you need to decide which of the two will best fulfill your purpose. Maybe the party, maybe having the neighbors over. But with a written purpose, it helps you choose deliberately.

We are a society who has bigger houses than ever, fewer people occupying them than ever, spending less time in them than ever and more in debt from buying more stuff than ever, with the least amount of time to enjoy it than ever. Realistically, the typical American family is trying to keep a pace that is insane.

We have the power to stop the insanity! We CAN live intentionally. We can choose to embrace the important things in life. But first we have to stop, get off the wheel and begin to simplify.

Join me in the upcoming posts for more practical ideas to simplify your life!

Debt, Saving Money and Large Families Don’t Have to Be on Food Stamps

(Added:  This post is in no way intended to make anyone feel bad about accepting government assistance.  It is only an expression of our personal experience and there is no attitude of “looking down” on others.)

“I guarantee you they are on food stamps.  There is NO way to raise that many children without government assistance.”

This was the statement someone made about our family–someone we actually know, though not very well.

Besides the fact that it hurts to be misunderstood, and it hurts to hear false presumptions actually being verbalized to others (I’m used to Internet slander that makes this comment look like a compliment), this one was so off-base it’s almost funny. Our family is not on government assistance nor have we ever been.

I won’t debate government funding in this post.  Our recent tragedy has certainly brought up a lot of discussion about FEMA and when or if it’s ever OK to receive government assistance. I don’t know all the answers.  But we’ve seen the church in action and praise God that we didn’t feel pressured to tap into a grossly depleted government treasury.

But back to the assumption that a large family can’t live without foodstamps…

I’ve written on the subject of family economy quite extensively, and there are many facets that can be discussed.

But the foundational misunderstanding may lie in lifestyle.  Americans are accustomed to believing they have an inalienable right to a certain level of lifestyle.  It’s just expected and so they reach for it no matter the cost.

Children are only as “expensive” as the lifestyle you choose.

Borrowing money for just about everything is considered absolutely necessary now whereas once upon a time it was a blight on one’s character to do so. As a result, many families are laden with heavy debt that enslaves them.

Younger families are starting out in debt and never catching up because the old idea of “working up” to a bigger, nicer home and better things is obsolete.  Now, newlyweds expect to start out with all the comforts their fifty-year-old parents enjoy.

Student loans laden the couple as well, many of whom pay on loans to the tune of 75K for the rest of their married lives.

Family vacations are expected.  Name brand clothing is a must.  Weekly manicures, multiple dinners out, sports and activities for the kids, electronic gadgets for the whole family, new furniture and appliances, bigger houses than we need, costly recreation, the list goes on.

The alternative?  Live more simply, “sacrifice” a few things we think we deserve, save for desired things, and be content with used things (bearing in mind that in our disposable society, used is often “barely used”).

For those wondering specifically how we manage with so many children, we try to follow the above recipe as well as some other things.  We don’t spend money perfectly.  We have made poor financial choices just like everyone else. But consider the following if you are looking to lighten your financial load:

• We don’t buy a car for every child.  We have one, older, used car besides our van and my husband’s truck.

• We go out to eat but not very often.

• We are given so many nice clothes that we hardly ever need to buy them.  We breastfeed our babies and our church gives us “diaper showers”. (Given these two things, our children literally don’t cost anything for the first year of their lives.)

• We stay home a lot which saves gas and the temptation to buy lunch, etc.

• We have one cell phone with a very cheap plan.  (Well, someone did give me a cell phone right after the storm.)

• We don’t own credit cards.

• We don’t watch much T.V. which, believe it or not, greatly reduces the pressure of purchasing due to the bombardment of ads.

• And a biggie:  we avoid Wal-mart as much as possible.

• We use Samaritan’s ministries instead of paying outrageous insurance fees.

To name a few.

We also trust God to provide and this trusting has brought about miraculous provision again and again.

And contrary to what some may assume, we do not feel the least bit deprived.  In fact, we feel especially blessed.

In addition, understanding how a family should really works makes a large family a financial benefit. As I’ve heard Kevin Swanson say, “we are a 7-income family”.  Our 12-year-old son already makes a little money from his website using his gift of art.  Our daughter has done some photography for a wedding or two. We anticipate that as our children get older, we not only have more hands to work in the garden producing food, or cutting firewood, etc., but we have more possibilities of everyone sharing in the family’s economy. Live together, share life together, provide together.

It is my heart’s desire to encourage families to get out of debt, avoid living beyond their means and enjoying the freedom of simplicity and God’s provision.  He has proven Himself so faithful, even in the midst of choices for which we are often persecuted.

I want to pass that hope along to you any way I can.

You can read a bit more about our journey to get out of debt (we are now completely DEBT FREE!), and find practical help in our ebook, Finding Financial Freedom.

Overview of Family Enterprise

An excellent overview of the family economy and the way the Industrial Revolution changed families:

“In early American history (and indeed much of world history), most business enterprises were family businesses with fathers working together with wives and children, where the fathers and mothers not only passed along skills, but also shepherded their children while working for a common purpose: the family economy.  The family could bond as they had common motivation, common compensation and common culture, all inside the intact family jurisdiction, the very center of economic activity.

As the industrial revolution spread across America, men were lured away from the home into the workplace and later on with the rise of public schools, children were also taken out of the home.  And in the last century, women abandoned their homes for the workplace in droves, leaving the majority of American homes dark, empty shells only used in the evenings and on weekends.  This has not only led to the disintegration of the family during the best hours of the day, but has also often led to the permanent death of a family as commonplace workplace romances split marriages and families asunder.”

Read the rest of “The Problem with Employees (Compared to Family Entrepreneurship)”, from New Venture Lab

Raising Entrepreneurs, Raising Leaders

We have been carefully defining “education” and implementing a “life-learning” educational paradigm for a while now.  This year, we’re kicking it up a notch.

Besides our basic 3 R’s, fundamental to any life pursuit, we are studying entrepreneurship as our focal subject.  Using a combination of inspiration (reading stories of other young entrepreneurs, casting a vision for the concept of entrepreneurship, etc.) and instruction, each child will develop his own business (the younger ones will help the older ones), implementing what we are learning as we go.

(Our son began his own business last year, and though he’s already making money from it–he’s got a knack for portrait sketching–we haven’t utilized the opportunity as we should to teach him all the mechanics of a working business. That is changing.)

Regardless of what our children grow up to pursue, the skills and knowledge to be gained from studying and establishing a business are priceless.

In simplified terms, I think of entrepreneurship as simply the ability to see lemonade when I look at lemons.  Giving our children the vision and skill sets to see opportunities and to embrace the challenges of life with optimism is an invaluable part of their education–a crucial life skill many young people are missing.

Are entrepreneurs born or made?  Perhaps both. But I can’t help but think we need to be more vigilant about showing our children the advantages and power of being self-made leaders, showing them that families can thrive working together, showing them that there are other options besides “assembly line education” that often just leaves college graduates thousands of dollars in debt with a job that sucks the life out of them.

Kerry Beck has some thought-provoking things to say:

“The first place to start in raising your students into leadership is to change your own education paradigm….Most of us grew up in a public or private school, which can be likened to a factory. All the students come to the factory or the school. They start in kindergarten and move on to first grade, down the conveyor belt. At each stage of the conveyor belt (or grade level), the student learns the exact same information as everyone else. The students are told what to think.”

“Leadership education ultimately involves the family as a whole. Initially, it takes much effort from a parent because you must be involved in learning and growing yourself. You cannot hand over some workbooks and say, “go for it.” Workbooks merely teach your children what to think, not how to think.”

-Kerry Beck

From Curriculum Connection

Kerry Beck is a homeschool mom and wife! She is the author of Raising Leaders, Not Followers, which encourages parents to train their children to be leaders who lead wisely. She would like to give you a free report about Leadership Education in Homeschool Curriculum

Think Outside the Classroom