...no one wants to read about finances. Money. Blah. Who talks about it, let alone devotes time to writing about it? But if we are going to be honest--let me rephrase that--if I am going to be honest here--I need to share a little bit about where I am right now. Even if "right now" lacks poetry...which it does.
The fact of the matter is this: Shawn and I are learning the hard lesson of having to live on a lot less than we have ever had to. Simultaneous to this change is that we were unexpectedly blessed to become parents of two children in a very short period of time. To be clear, we were never resentful of God's timing in providing us with Eleanor and Charles, but as with many things we might have done it a bit differently. Waited a little longer. Saved a little more. Shawn owns that he would have liked to finish graduate school before becoming a dad. I would have liked to start graduate school.
But...
James 4:13-15 says:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
And...
Jeremiah 29:11 says:
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
So...
Despite having days of seeming despair, I am continually reminded that His ways are higher, better and ultimately more fulfilling than mine will ever be. And blessings are continually before me: our health, our family, our children, our friends.
In an effort to stay in this grateful, surrendered space I've decided to share some of the emotional and practical implications of this life change in hopes that it might also be helpful for someone out there. When we first knuckled down to trim our budget, I did lots of Google searching: "How to live on $X per month" and "How much does that average family spend, save, etc. per month". What I really wanted to pop up was a first hand, personal account of how a real family had gone through a financial squeeze. In the coming weeks, I'll share the facts of our situation and the things that I am learning along the way. I'll still write about other stuff, but for the sake of differentiation this story will be chronicled as Project Less is More. My hope is that a project, which at its outset might seem a bummer, will capture a time in our lives where God met us in the midst of our difficulty and grew us up in Him and showed us that He is the "more" that we both need and desire.
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