A lot has happened since I stood up at the Breathe Conference and committed to exploring how to live the Promise of life for a year. Most notably, I got married. For me, the most amazing thing has been exploring the Promise of Life as a couple. We live in a tower block in a poor council estate in London. What does living generous, Jesus filled lives look like?
For us we’ve experimented with a few things. The best by far has been starting a Residents Association for in our tower block. Being generous with our lives has meant visiting residents, having them around for food, taking the time to chat in the lift, praying most days for people we’ve got to know.
Tomorrow is our big day!! Its our first residents association event. We’ve organized ‘Love Allbrook House Day’ – a glorified name for a big block clean. Cleaning the wee off the lift and stairwell floors, picking up the litter and used needles, and scrubbing dirt off the walls. And we’re doing it together, as a group of residents who are now not our neighbors, they are our friends.
The Promise of Life has been just that – it’s helped us to start living more generously with those around us. And the best thing is life is so much better because of it.
The EA have been promoting their simplify campaign and Andy Reed MP has been taking part. Here’s a video and a link to his blog of how he got on for a month
I found the process of writing the Promise of Life with others really inspiring (you might want to write your own or adapt this one for use with friends).
As for what it has meant in this first six months, I’ve been haunted (and blessed!) by the phrase, ‘no longer hurried, distracted or worried’. They say that often one of the first works of God in our lives is to show us where we’re falling short. That’s how it has been with this sentence! But equally I’ve been trying to take up Stephen Cottrell’s advice (in his book Do Nothing To Change Your Life) and spend a little time in stillness each day. As a result of this, and the Promise, I think I am less harried than I would have been.
Another thing has been “giving myself” more deeply to my family. Now we have four kids, this is even more important. I’m aware, too, how blessed we are to have the family that we do. This year, as part of trying to be more generous, we’ve not holidayed except to stay with family around the country. Their generosity has helped us to be generous.
In fact, the more I think of it, the more I realize that this last 6 months has been more about learning to receive than learning to give. Through Streetbank we got a new scooter for our son, through our neighbours we’ve received all kinds of help when our new daughter came. The Promise of Life is coming true for us, bit by bit, but as ever it’s not always in ways we imagined…
This has been a year of big changes for myself and my wife. We’ve been married for 18 months, Lou has gone freelance in her work, we bought a house and we’re currently renovating it. In short, we’re settling down. We’re making ourselves at home, working out our place in the world and what we want out of life. Given that I now own a shed, I am probably officially entering middle age as well.
All of this is fun and scary in equal measure, and we feel young and naive and very grown up at the same time. Suddenly there’s a whole lot to think about, and the learning curve is pretty steep. Some of it is mundane, like choosing taps and wallpaper (who knew taps were so expensive?) Some of it is unexpectedly serious, like mortgages and life insurance.
In the midst of all of this, I’m aware that we have quite a unique window of opportunity. The patterns of life we create for ourselves now will shape the way we live in the future, the sorts of people we will be. If we want to live generously, we have an opportunity to build that in from the beginning.
That puts a different spin on all those other decisions. Can we create a home that is for others as much as it is for ourselves? A house that embodies hospitality and welcome, and that has a low impact on the environment? Can we work out how much we need to live on, earn just enough, and then give the rest of our time away? How are we going to build community with our new neighbours?
This time of life could so easily be all about us, but making ourselves comfortable in the world is not the aim of the game. Life in all its fullness does not lie within the pages of Ideal Home magazine. In the great paradox of the kingdom of God, life comes to those who give it away, and that’s what Breathe’s promise of life is all about.
Jeremy Williams – Friend of Breathe
Tom Nelson at The Gospel Coalition Blog has written a very good piece on generosity. Here’s a taster:
“Jesus and Paul both knew a transforming theological truth: When we embrace lifestyles of joyful generosity—even in times of economic difficulty—we experience the rich blessing of living as we were meant to live.”
Six months ago I joined many others in Breathe committing to the Promise of Life for a year. The Promise frames a set of aspirations for people who want to move towards a simpler lifestyle.
I don’t consider myself to excel in self-discipline or a strong will. Thankfully the Promise is something we do together, full of grace. It is replete with reminders that our aspiration and effort towards simplicity is not in isolation and, more than that, it can’t be. The Promise is shared, it reads ‘we’ and ‘our’, not ‘I’ and ‘my’.
The Promise has taken me back to a place of gratitude, to ‘Savour what we have’.
We live in an era obsessed with image and self-help, where messages in modern life are sharply attuned to highlight our flaws, creating and preying on our insecurities.
It is easy to look at our lives through a lens of scarcity – what do I lack? What do I need? The Promise has helped remind me of how rich I am – ‘Life is a gift, we live it thankfully’. It reminds us of a place of plenty, not of scarcity. It brings me back to a place of gratitude and contentment, and away from a sense of need and entitlement.
We all face difficult and challenging situations. I work for an international aid agency and am often left feeling hopeless and helpless. Yet in the last six months I’ve met the most amazing people living beautiful and simple lives amid poverty and adversity. Glancing at the Promise – printed on a card on my desk – reminds me of them. And it reminds me of my commitment and place within ‘family’, ‘community’ and ‘the Kingdom of love’.
We look forward to hearing your stories and thoughts about your journey with Breathe and the Promise of Life.
Chris Webster – Friend of Breathe
As I’m just finishing a book on Consumerism, I thought I’d share my thoughts on some of the literature out there. It’s a personal Top Ten, of course; and I’ve chosen books from a broadly Christian view. Perhaps you have your own suggestions / recommendations?
1 Unfettered Hope by Marva Dawn – This was the one that put it all together for me: justice, lifestyle, consumer Christianity, technology and how to break the mould. She ranges around a bit, but for sheer inspiration and clarity of insight, this is my number one.
2 Consuming Religion by Vincent Miller – written by a Catholic theologian/sociologist this is pretty deep stuff. But he gets to the issues – how consumerism began, why it grew and how it works – like no other book. Very sharp on advertising and seduction, the news media, and how consumerism shapes our lives and therefore our spirituality.
3 Money, Sex and Power by Richard Foster – worth it for the title alone! For some reason I found this more approachable than his volume on Simplicity (see No. 7, below). He deals with the biblical teaching more fairly than anything I’ve read, does justice to the kingdom of God (no easy thing), but avoids a shrill tone. Plus, he’s living it, too.
A while back I posted on The Story of Stuff. And I received a vociferous response from a blogger called clancop. Though his comments had actually just been pasted into another website which featured The Story of Stuff, I thought they merited a reply.
What’s the point in criticising consumerism if it creates jobs and is an important part of our free society? How can we be sure that some of the facts and figures being swapped around are correct? Isn’t consumerism a great good that lifts people out of poverty by building a strong economy?
These are the big questions. So I thought I’d try to take the discussion further.
You can see the critique of The Story of Stuff, by Lee Doran, here. This post is a critique of the critique! Hang on to your hats…
An interesting article from an unlikely source. It ends like this
“You pursue living under heaven by cultivating a growing love relationship with Jesus, and you continue that by growing in your love for your spouse and your children. Invest in both. What you value is what you will pass on to them. If you value things under the sun, they most likely will too. But if you seek first the kingdom of God by leading and instructing your children in the Scriptures, modelling holy, sacrificial living for them, they likely will pursue the same.”
Read the whole thing here
