When I was a kid, we would often have family game nights. Bingo was a particular favorite. When playing Bingo, one person calls out the letters and numbers as they popped out of the Bingo cage spinner, and the rest would scramble to put their chips on the respective spaces
It’s no secret that technology has affected how many hours we work. Previously, many folks were able to leave work and then be present for home and leisure activities. But things have changed. In the last few decades, technology has redefined the workday from the humble “9 to 5” to
At this point, you’ve probably heard of Marie Kondo. Her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up became extremely popular in 2014, spawning more books, TV shows, a patented tidying up system, a branded organizational line at the Container Store, and a self-branded online store so that folks could
Last month, our lives changed with one phone call. After a long and involved process, my husband Will and I found out from our assigned social worker at the adoption agency that we were picked by the birth mother to adopt a baby boy! He had just been born two
Last month I participated in a silent retreat at Holy Cross Monastery. Yes, you read that correctly. I voluntarily signed up and went on a retreat at which no one talked for days on end. And yes, there were other people at this retreat. Twenty-five of us or so went
Note: This is a guest post by Meghan Davis-Brass, pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Newton, Iowa, where she also teaches yoga and lives with her husband and dog. Meghan has entirely too much stuff and considers this one of her primary spiritual struggles. Then Jesus called the twelve together
Consumer culture is incredibly prevalent in the U.S., so much so that we often assume automatically that more is better. We are encouraged to spend our time, energy, and financial resources on accumulating more and more material possessions, while also continuously being dissatisfied so that we keep buying and consuming
In August, my husband Will and I went on a cruise with my parents. These family trips used to be a tradition (happening about every other year), but because of personal schedules and the pandemic, we hadn’t been on a trip together in five years. On our last trip five
It’s no secret that businesses and consumer culture use all sorts of tactics to get us to buy more stuff. We see a lot of these tactics in advertisements and how consumer culture functions– appealing to our base needs, manufacturing a sense of urgency, and perpetuating a sense of dissatisfaction
It’s easy to get into the habit of thinking about life and the events happening around you in very specific ways. We cling to tried-and-true thought processes because it’s easier than expending more thought energy to think in a different way. But living more simply as a Christian minimalist means