How to Start a Business When You Don’t Believe in Capitalism

Not too long ago I posted on the facebook, “I don’t even really believe in capitalism, but I feel like an official business since I paid quarterly sales tax for the first time today.”

For those not aware after our family was deported from Bolivia, I started a small business called Edible Lawns. The business is modeled after landscaping companies, but focuses on using your yard to grow food (vegetables, fruits, chickens, even fish) and create more environmentally friendly landscapes (xeriscaping, native landscaping, compost and rainwater systems). I also intend for it to be something similar to a B Corporation which incorporates more than one bottom line into the company’s legal structure including social and environmental factors.

I also have written a lot about my thoughts on economics which should make it clear that I am not a particular fan of our current economic structures. So, what’s a “tree-hugging socialist” like myself doing starting a business?

First, I hope you noticed the quotes and intended sarcasm in describing myself as a “tree-hugging socialist.” Those type of designations are usually intended to create some sort of  us-and-them paradigm. That’s exactly what I try to avoid. The reality is always more complicated than those designations which is exactly why I don’t feel all dirty starting a business.

The truth is that we live in a world that is governed by a particular economic system and structures. I can’t snap my fingers and expect it to change overnight. I still have to deal with those realities in my daily existence which means paying my mortgage, buying food, health insurance and gasoline. There are ways in which I hope to subvert these structures in the way I organize my own economic life through bartering, scavenging for free materials, growing more of my own food and starting a business which can help others do the same.

So, I would rather pay the bills doing something I can feel good about and which hopefully contributes to creating the kind of world I believe God intends. Right now, the only ways to do this are through either a non-profit or for-profit structure. I mentioned that B (or Benefit) Corporations are a new legal structure that attempts to navigate a third option for socially and ecologically responsible businesses.

The recurring question in my life is how change happens. Is it by working within the system or doing something radical outside it which challenges and threatens the existing structure? Is it some combination of both or another option I don’t understand yet? I have studied social movements from civil rights to the Occupy movement for answers, but those movements eventually become co-opted once they reach a certain stage. So, the answer is still not so clear to me.

What does seem clear is that change does not happen by standing still. Real meaningful change seems to require both the radical shifts in thinking and the gradual education of the masses through incremental changes.

Take my favorite topic as an example, compost. I have taken the radical step of composting my own waste with the intention of using it to grow my food creating a closed nutrient cycle. This is a few steps beyond the average citizen’s ability to change. Most people don’t even compost their food waste. How can I expect them to poop in a bucket? So, you start with something more palatable, but never as the end in itself. Without the vision for a sustainable world, we will simply recycle ourselves into oblivion. But without a willingness to walk with people along the way, we won’t ever get there.

That’s why I’m a capitalist, business owner who doesn’t think that capitalism will be around forever or that it is the best possible system for organizing our lives together. I don’t see it as cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy. I see it more as loving the world and vision for sustainable living more than my own self-righteousness.

Meanwhile…

Well, I am certainly missing the lifestyle we enjoyed in Charagua, Bolivia that allowed me to read and write so prolifically. These days I struggle just to find balance between work, more work, family and community. Welcome home to the United States and North American culture!

I am now working in the technology department for the local school district, exploring my inner geek (which is more and more becoming my outer geek). I am also continuing to try and grow my small business, Edible Lawns, which is as much about education as installing raised bed gardens, compost and rainwater systems.

For a couple months now my third job has been working on buying a house (without a realtor and with extra work getting assistance from the city and a community development corporation). Now that that process is complete life is slowing down slightly. Even though I have a long list of plans to make my lawn more edible, perhaps things have slowed down enough that I might be able to read and write some more.

I have a long list of posts that I started in the last year or so, that I can pick up and I’m still excited about the Food in the Bible series. However, I might spend some time first, processing what we have been going through and dealing with in our own lives first. So, here’s some things you might read about in the near future:

“How to Start a Business When You Don’t Believe in Capitalism” or

“Reconciliation: Something We Do or Something God Does?” or

“Adventures in Avoiding Real Community” or

“The Gospel of Unschooling and Dreadlocks”

Hopefully that whets your appetite and hopefully I will have time to satisfy it with some thoughtful, provocative posts.

Let Go and… Just Let Go

While it may seem that I went into hibernation for the winter, the truth is quite the opposite. If you have been reading this blog for long, you likely know that our world was very much turned upside down this fall as we were deported from Bolivia. You can read more about that here and here. So, we have found ourselves once again in a long strange transition back to North American culture.

I now have a full time job working in the Technology department of our local school district. I’m also continuing to build my small business, Edible Lawns. So, balancing two jobs, family and life with our community has made time for writing or reading pretty tricky. I long for the days spent on our porch in Bolivia with nothing to do, but read and write. Yet here I am in a culture and circumstances that seem set against this slower way of life.

The task now is to figure out how to embody this other way of life in the midst of our time and money obsessed culture. There’s a small group of people in our community who are asking these same questions. Questions like, “How do we organize our lives together so that we only have to work part-time and commit more time and energy to community projects and small businesses?” or “How do we make it so that health insurance does not dictate where we work?”. The question I struggle with most is “How do I live out this other reality right now in the midst of the craziness that has become my life?”

The temptation of our cultural mentality is to say that the end justifies the means. Working like mad, being stressed out and neglecting my family is just a step along the way to my goal of the leisurely life that will come when my small business takes off. Did you laugh at the end of that sentence? You should have. This is the madness of the world we live in. This is almost never the way it works. The grass is never greener, especially in the midst of a drought in Texas!

So, I hope to have time again to devote to writing here again, but can make no promises about when, how often or how frequent. Neglecting this blog and other online presences feels really healthy, letting go of my need to put myself out there. Yet here I am. And there I am on twitter and facebook. We are always such a mixed bag.

The favorite evangelical trope “Let go and let God” seems like a way to maintain our control while pretending that we have let go. As long as our God is willing to micro-manage and control our destiny, we can pass of the illusion of control without feeling subject to the real vagaries of our existence. Over these months, I have at times struggled with feelings of depression and wrestled with any purpose for our experience. I have sat with the idea that all of my efforts will ultimately be fruitless and in vain. I have not come up with my mission in life or God’s purpose for everything that has happened. Nothing really makes sense out of life except that “compost happens”, which is to say both that bad things happen for no apparent reason and that decay and decomposition are as much a part of the process as new life, blooming flowers and beautiful ripe fruit.

I’ll end this rambling diatribe with a promise to share some of what I am struggling through and learning in this space as much for myself as for anyone that might read it. I hope to return to the more theological and seemingly esoteric exegesis of the role of food in the Bible soon, but in some ways I feel like what I am struggling with now is the real heart of the matter. More than asking just what we should eat, which is intended to be a question of ethics, I and my community are asking how we can begin to live out some of these ideas more fully in our particular lives and places. There is some excitement and creativity in the midst of struggling through these very mundane issues of how to pay the bills, feed yourself and still find community and sustainability.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Immigration and Incarnation

This is an article I wrote recently for Shalom Connections, a newsletter for the Shalom Missions Communities. It’s a good summary and synthesis of our time in Bolivia.

If it is about the journey and not the destination, then our family has certainly been in the midst of it for the past year or so. After living at World Hunger Relief for a year as the Urban Gardening intern and becoming part of Companerismo de Esperanza in Waco, TX, we made the decision to accept a position with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Bolivia working with their Low German Program. Even though MCC takes care of all the financial needs of volunteers, we still considered ourselves sent and commissioned by Hope Fellowship. We felt their support and connection throughout our time in Bolivia, skype-ing with people when we could and reading emails and minutes of meetings.

We also made the decision that storing our things for three years of our lives seemed like a waste of resources. So we began to give our things away, to shed ourselves of that heavy, dead skin that so easily weighs us down. We gave away things that did not seem like a necessity to own such as a stereo, movies, books, toys and kitchen gadgets. We also gave away things that feel more like necessities: beds, dressers, pillows, pots and pans.

We were on an adventure and there was no telling where it would take us. We were excited about learning Spanish in the context of Latin America. We were also nervous about learning a second language and culture of the Low German Mennonites, old colony Mennonites that are culturally similar to the Amish who speak Low German and have migrated throughout the Americas. There was a world of unknown possibilities, anticipation and excitement ahead of us.

We arrived in Cochabamba, Bolivia on November 8, 2010 with our entire lives stuffed into eight suitcases. We were there for a month for language school. We lived with a host family and slowly adjusted to our new surroundings. Every member of the family got sick in the first weeks as our bodies adjusted to altitude and new microbes in the food we ate and the air we breathed.

After language school we flew to Santa Cruz, the largest city in Bolivia, for orientation with MCC, where we lived with another host family. There we experienced Christmas and New Year’s with a Bolivian family. Then in January we lived for three weeks with a Low German family in Chihuahua colony.

The little that I have learned about the history of Low German Mennonites (LGMs) is a fascinating tale. Like other Anabaptists, they were persecuted for their beliefs in Europe. They eventually settled in Russia with an agreement between their people and the government that has come to define their history. They were initially granted the right to their own land, their own schools in their own language and their own form of governance. For all intents and purposes, colonies were (and are) their own separate entities apart from the nation-state in which they exist. This was their way of living out their two-kingdom theology of being “Stille im Land” or “Quiet in the Land”.

After many years the Russian government decided that these colonies should become more integrated into the broader society and, at the very least, learn Russian. The response by the LGMs eventually was to leave Russia and settle in Canada where they were able to secure a similar agreement with the Canadian government. This pattern repeats itself throughout the LGM history, mixed in with internal disagreements over how to deal with these changes. When the Canadian government challenged the colony educational system, many colonies and families moved to Mexico and eventually throughout the Americas.

Often when colonies became divided over an issue (such as whether or not to use rubber tires on their tractors), the more conservative groups would find their way to Bolivia. So, Bolivia became, in some ways, a repository for the most conservative of the conservative LGMs. However, the colony we stayed in was considered the most progressive in Bolivia, which primarily meant that they used a lot more technology, modern tractors, combines, cell phones, computers and the internet. Worship was still segregated by gender, however, and their theology is very conservative.

It was a wonderful experience to live with a LGM family and understand their culture in a more personal and intimate way. Similar to our experience living for many years in the shadow of the largest military installation in the free world, it was a lesson in loving people with whom we have fundamental disagreements, in humanizing “the Other”.

After our colony stay, we made the decision to move to Charagua, a small town in southern Bolivia in the foothills of the Andes and seven hours from Santa Cruz by bus. Charagua is divided into the pueblo, the main town, and the Estación, the small community around the train station about 8 kilometers from the pueblo, which is where we lived. Charagua is the largest municipality in Bolivia in terms of land area.

The largest population is the indigenous Guaraní who were famously portrayed in the movie The Mission. Their territory covers areas of Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and Bolivia and is known as the Chaco. This area crosses lines arbitrarily drawn and fought over by both Spanish conquistadors and multinational corporations (who used the indigenous as proxies during the Chaco War).

The second largest population is the LGMs that live in four colonies to the east of Charagua Estación. They are one of, if not the largest, economic drivers in this region as agricultural producers. Since LGMs do not believe in using modern vehicles, they contract Bolvians for transportation. This includes transporting their produce, primarily sorghum, sesame, soy and corn, as well as themselves for travel primarily to Santa Cruz. While the colonies in this area are among the poorest in Bolivia, they enjoy a standard of living well above many Bolivians. There were also other indigenous people in Charagua including Quechua and Aymaras. The smallest population is referred to as “Spanish-speaking Bolivians”.

Our work focused on water issues and small-scale agriculture with both the Guaranís and the LGMs. Part of our work was also what MCC refers to as “connecting peoples”. In the past MCC put together workshops where indigenous people and LGMs learned from each other about soap making and agriculture.

Our neighbor in Charagua was a Guaraní sociologist, who had worked for the Bolivian government, traveled the world and represented his people on a national level. One day he was showing me around some land where he was working to establish a new community. As we walked through fields of sesame, he shared with me about an international conference of indigenous people that he attended in the United States. The conference came to an agreement about some of the basic rights that indigenous people wanted. These included access to land, their own education system in their own language and their own form of governance.

Then he made the connection that these were the things that the LGMs had secured from the Bolivian government in 1963. It was eye-opening to see that two very different people with very different cultures and worldviews had something very fundamental in common. In fact I began to realize that we are all indigenous to somewhere. Anglos come from particular places that originally shaped them genetically and culturally. They are also the ones who decided to go out and conquer other peoples across the world, but they belong no less to those particular places that originally shaped them.

Charagua municipality voted in December 2009 to become one of 11 “autonomous indigenous zones” under the new Bolivian constitution. While we were there, we helped the Autonomy Assembly organize a meeting with LGM leaders in which they explained the autonomy process and invited them to participate. The LGM’s two-kingdom theology sharply distinguishes between the church and the world. As the secular authorities the LGMs believe that they are ordained by God and therefore submit to any decisions they make. They politely thanked the Assembly for informing them about the process, but declined to participate in any way. They were very reluctant to even give any opinions, ideas, questions or thoughts. It was fascinating to see these worlds collide.

Not long after that meeting, we received a phone call early one morning from our country representative informing us that Bolivian immigration had called and said that we had to leave the country and would not be allowed back into the country for five years. We were in shock. We had three days to pack up our eight suitcases, say goodbye to all of our friends, my son’s kindergarten class at the local school and the people with whom we worked. Our neighbor and his family threw a wonderful despedida for us the day before we left.

The reason we were given for being deported was that we had overstayed our tourist visa with which we had entered the country. There were also clearly political tensions between the Bolivian government and the United States. The U.S. Ambassador was expelled from the country and Evo Morales continued ratcheting up his rhetoric at the United Nations and elsewhere. There are clear historical precedents for many Latin American leaders’ animosity toward El Norte. However, the Morales’ administration began to seem paranoid.

The Bolivian government announced plans to build a road, partially funded by Brazil, through a national park that is home to three indigenous groups. The indigenous groups responded by denouncing the move as unconstitutional since they were not consulted. When the government continued, they protested by marching in the streets and blockading roads. The morning that we were supposed to leave our home for Santa Cruz so we could be at an immigration hearing, the Guaranís blockaded the only road to Santa Cruz in solidarity with the other indigenous groups.

While Evo Morales is, himself, indigenous, he belongs to the highland indigenous, who have historic animosity toward the lowland indigenous which continues today. The Morales’ administration claimed that these protests by indigenous groups were orchestrated and backed by the United States.

So, you can begin to understand the atmosphere under which we faced deportation. As privileged people of European descent, it was certainly a new experience for us to be uprooted and expelled by a government for reasons that were flimsy at best. We felt rejected and ashamed. We had done nothing wrong. In fact, we were there to help.

Yet, while we felt some solidarity with what many of our immigrant brothers and sisters experience in the United States, we also realized how different our experience was. We had native speakers working on our behalf with the Bolivian government. Not many immigrants in the U.S. can afford that. We had a safe place to stay while the situation was worked out. Many immigrants in the U.S. are taken away from their families to detention centers and held without contact. We had a community to come back to in our home country. Some immigrants in the U.S. who get deported were raised there, do not speak Spanish and have no support system in their “home” country.

Our experience moving to Bolivia and ultimately being deported is one of immigration and incarnation. We were immigrants in a foreign land, “extranjeros, imigrantes, exiliados.” This is part of what it means to be a pilgrim people. We are not Jesus, but in imitation of him we cross borders and boundaries. We cross over to the Other to understand, embrace and love those whom God has made and gifted. In many ways we continue to grieve the loss of our time in Bolivia, but in others, as you can see, we have been enriched and blessed in the midst of our suffering, not in spite of it.

Seasons greetings avid reader! I hope your Advent season of waiting, hope and expectation in the midst of darkness is going well. I had hoped to keep up with writing even in the midst of our transition back to North American life and culture. Alas! I have not. Fear not! I will most certainly write again. When I dare not predict, but, as surely as Jesus is coming, I will most definitely grace these pages with deep thoughts, exegesis and snarky commentary once again. See you soon!

Meanwhile, I pray you all have a season of hope that embodies the life of the one who emptied himself in the midst of a culture that attempts to empty our pockets and lives of meaning.

Jubilee is Salvation (Leviticus 25:9-10)

The second thing I noticed (Read What Shall We Eat? for the first) in re-reading Leviticus 25 is that the Jubilee is explicitly connected to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. This is the pinnacle of the sacrificial system to which Jesus’ death and resurrection has often been compared. While I don’t think that the sacrificial system is the only lens through which Jesus’ life, death and resurrection was or should be understood, it certainly is an important one both in Scripture and in the Christian tradition. So, what does it mean then that the Jubilee is supposed to be initiated by a shofar blast on the Day of Atonement?

If you just google Yom Kippur and Jubilee you will quickly find a lot of nonsense about the rapture happening on Yom Kippur in the year of Jubilee. That is not what this post is about. This is about the connection between the social practices found in the Jubilary code and its association with the cultic religious ritual of Yom Kippur. I would like to explore a series of questions concerning this connection: What is the role of the shofar and its connections to both religious and social contexts? What is the religious significance of Yom Kippur? Why is it connected to the Jubilee (or conversely why do we disconnect them)? Finally, what does this connection tell us about the nature of salvation in terms of Jubilee?

When was the shofar used?
The shofar was used in different contexts, but primarily announced full religious holidays. This was also the case with the Jubilee which was connected to the religious festivals that marked the Jewish calendar.

The sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah announced the jubilee year, and the sound of the shofar on Yom Kippur proclaimed the actual release of financial encumbrances. (from Wikipedia)

It is interesting to note that the shofar was also used as a call to arms when Israel went to war. The most famous instance of this use of the shofar is certainly from the book of Joshua when the blast of the shofar horn brought down the walls of the city of Jericho. M. Douglas Meeks describes the significance of that event in his book God The Economist.

The blowing of the Jubilee horn (shofar) in the story of Joshua is the symbol of what brings down the rotten economy of Jericho. (89)

The theology of war in the Hebrew Bible was that the battle always belonged to YHWH. Often battles were won through some sort of trickery which sometimes avoided bloodshed and often avoided the Israelites committing violence (e.g. Gideon in Judges 7). When Israel ignored YHWH and tried to fight their own battles their efforts were typically thwarted. This is not to excuse the violence in the Hebrew Bible that is clear and difficult to understand, particularly when commanded by God.

My point is that there is a theological thread throughout the Hebrew Bible that says YHWH will fight the battles for Israel. In this context the blast of the shofar that brought down the walls of Jericho could certainly be interpreted as proclaiming liberation from economic domination and oppression and the institution of a new economy. It is also important, as we will see shortly, that there was not the clear distinction between sacred and secular that we try to draw today. Thus, the shofar as a sacred instrument proclaimed Jubilee both in the temple and on the battlefield.

What does Yom Kippur mean?
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the culmination of the Jewish year. In the Hebrew Bible this was the ritual when the High Priest placed his hands symbolically on the head of a goat designating it “Azazel”. This transferred the sins of the people to the goat which was then driven out into the wilderness. This is where the term “scapegoat” comes from. Through this ritual the entire community was purified, their sins atoned for. In other words, this was a chance for the community to start from scratch in their relationship to YHWH. It was also an opportunity for repentance as the community recognized their sins and brokenness. There was now new possibility for living a new way.

What has the Jubilee to do with Yom Kippur?
According to Jubilee USA the practical connection between the Jewish calendar and the year of Jubilee worked like this:

From Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur of the fiftieth year, slaves would not return home but would not work either. The fields would not return to their hereditary owners, but the owners would eat, drink and rejoice with their crowns upon their heads. Then, when Yom Kippur arrived, the slaves would return home and the fields would revert to their hereditary owners.

So, there is very explicit connection between the practice of Jubilee (theoretically at least) and the rhythms of the Jewish calendar. The Jubilee is announced at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, but this is only the beginning. It’s also interesting to point out that the Jewish new year begins in Autumn at the end of the harvest. The new year begins when the possibilities of the earth have been exhausted for that year and we turn to look toward the possibilities of next season. In light of the previous post which talked about the divinely abundant harvest promised prior to the Jubilee, this moment of turning from an incredible provision beyond expectations to the year of liberation ahead is heightened that much more.

The culmination of the Jubilary practices coincides with the culmination of the religious calendar on Yom Kippur when the Jubilee is proclaimed in its fullness and fulfilled completely. Jubilee is a process. It does not occur all at once. It is first declared and the enacted. This is the way many understand the nature of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. This new order or economy is first proclaimed and embodied by Jesus, but we are now in the process of enacting the fullness of that declaration with the promise that it will someday be complete.

What has the Jubilee to do with Atonement?
So, the very practical social ethic of the Jubilee has been intimately linked to the religious calendar of the Jewish people. This is to be expected from a worldview that did not distinguish the sacred from the secular. The practice of the Jubilee is the enacting of the divine economy within the community and is therefore inextricably linked to Israel’s relationship to YHWH maintained through the temple practices and rituals including Yom Kippur.

The Jubilee, or “Year of the Lord’s favor”, is picked up by Isaiah (61:1-3) and later Jesus (Lk 4:19) and made central to the identity of God’s people in both testaments. Further, Jesus’ work on the cross has been understood in relationship to the sacrificial system in Israel. He is called the “Lamb of God” by John the Baptist (Jn 1:29) and later in another John’s vision in Revelation (Rev 5:6-8; 7:10). So, Jesus identifies his mission with the Jubilee and the Jubilee is intertwined with the sacrificial system by which we have tried to understand the cross. Therefore whatever we want to say about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, it must include this understanding that the proclamation of new beginnings on Yom Kippur is also the declaration of the radical new economy of the Jubilee. Salvation is Jubilee and vice versa.

Living With Less in the Land of More

Many are reflecting on the stuff we own and how it owns us in this season of shopping and gift-giving. I read an excellent article recently about one family’s journey with their relationship to their stuff (Stuffed to the gills: How crap took over my life—and how I intend to take it back). So, I thought I would reflect on my family’s journey with our relationship to our stuff. Many of your stories are probably similar in many respects.

The Birth of the Monster
It all began… well, when I was born, but that would take to long. Accumulating stuff really hit an exponential growth curve when we got married. Neither of us had too much stuff after college, but we had both lived on our own long enough to accumulate more than enough. Not only does a wedding combine two people’s stuff, it piles on a whole host of new stuff on top of what you already have. We tried to keep it simple by encouraging people to donate in our name to a charity, but in our culture it doesn’t really count unless you buy something for somebody. So, we filled our registry at various places and people piled up the presents. Even with all the gifts we still had room to spare in our little two bedroom apartment.

Then we made two more decisions that many people make which set us on a trajectory to having more stuff, 1) we bought a house (bigger than our apartment) and 2) we decided to have kids. We bought the house first and people tend to fill the space that they live in. We tried to keep things minimal, but living in an empty house also seems kind of silly. Then we had kids. Between baby showers and grandparents these little 7 to 8 pound bundles of joy come with an incredible amount of stuff for being unable to eat solid foods, walk, sit up or burp without help. They continually acquire new stuff every year for birthdays and new clothes as they grow faster than sea monkeys.

Taming the Monster
While we considered ourselves to be people that tried to live simply and consume less, we found ourselves trying to figure out what to do with a 1600 square foot house full of stuff when we decided to move to the World Hunger Relief, Inc. farm where we had a small two bedroom apartment. There were a lot of craigslist ads and a big yard sale. We tried to think hard about what we needed and what was worth keeping. Still, when moving day came we had to put a lot of boxes into storage (at my mom’s) and managed to fill up the apartment nicely.

Then we accepted a position with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Bolivia. We thought it was silly to put our stuff in storage for three years. So, we got rid of everything. This time we really did. We got rid of all our furniture, chairs, table, futon, beds, dressers…our car…everything. We still had some things stored at my mom’s but even that was picked over and cleaned out. We pared down our material possessions to an absolute minimum. It was a crazy, radical move that tested our faith and resolve to trust God and the Body of Christ.

Yet, when we got to Bolivia our eight suitcases seemed a little excessive in light of the people around us who had so much less. While living there and working with MCC, I wrote about what it means to live simply (What is Simple Living?). Once again our ideas about what was enough, what was simple and what we needed were challenged. Each time we moved and tried to simplify we learned more about what was important and what was not.

Now that we are back in the United States, we are looking to replace some of those items we so happily gave away. We hope to add these things back into our life slowly and be discerning about what we really need. We’ve asked our community to share their excess with us as we shared with them. What we have found is that we continue to have more than we need, because our friends both have more than they need and are willing to share it with us.

Lessons From the Monster
The obvious lesson here is that you should pursue downward mobility by moving every few years to poorer and poorer places in the world, right? As the aforementioned article also points out, moving does provide an opportunity to evaluate what’s worth piling in a moving van. Yet I’ve often talked about the importance of place and putting down roots. So, perhaps the solution is a discipline of seasonal cleaning. We already have this cultural concept of “spring cleaning“, but how many of us practice it? Choose a time of year to give your stuff a good cleaning and share with others out of your abundance.

There’s also trying to cut the monster’s head off from the beginning. We tried an alternative wedding registry for such a purpose, but with little success. I know others have held their ground and been more effective. I found The Scavenger’s Manifesto to be a great resource with more than just tips and tricks for finding free stuff, but a different way of thinking about our stuff.

Patience is the most important and most difficult virtue when considering our shopping. Consumerism is based on impulse buys and tickling our acquisition bone. The longer you can avoid the instant gratification temptation to buy stuff the moment you think of it, the more things will simply filter out over time. Then you’re left with things that were worth the wait to buy. You’ll probably find a good deal, find a cheaper alternative or at least thought more carefully through your purchase.

Finally, I mentioned in Wading Into the Pond last week some ideas about how to move from charity to justice in our lives.

1. Don’t do it alone- Find others to walk with you on the journey.
2. Learn to talk again- Within relationships of trust, we have to learn how to talk about our finances with others.
3. The Holy Excise Tax- Find creative ways to hold each other accountable and make your choices more transparent
4. Saints and Sinners- Show yourself and others grace. The goal is not being more righteous or holy than others, but attempting to follow Jesus into a new way of living.