This Sunday we will be in the second message in a two part series on finances and money here at GCF. After dissecting the financial problem that most average Americans find themselves in this past week and talking about what a huge “change of heart” we need in regard to our finances, we will turn this week to the idea “Learning Contentment”.
There is one point in the message this Sunday that has been providing me with some personal grief. It is the idea that we can learn contentment by cutting our consumption. This runs totally against the grain of the culture in the United States. Since I will be challenging GCF’ers to learn ways to cut consumption, we have been talking about how to do this at our house.
Did you know that we use 955,000 tons of brown paper bags in the United States each year. It takes 13 to 16 trees to produce each ton of bags. That means that we are cutting down 12.4 million to 16.1 million trees for paper bags every year; bags that we usually throw away after we use them.
Did you know that 8% of all crude oil that is pumped each year is used to produce the plastics that are used for plastic grocery bags, bottled water, soda and other items? We use a lot of that stuff at our house.
I do not describe myself as an environmentalist, nor do I consider myself green or “going green”, (by this, I mean that I am not afraid of Global Warming) but I am finding that I am really struggling with how to be a better steward of the resources God has given us; not just to take better care of what we’ve been given, but also because I believe it increases our sense of appreciation of what we have. I believe that it is a visible sign of love and appreciation for the Father and I am certain that developing appreciation and showing love for our Father leads to more contentment in life.
Here are a few things we are considering at our house by way of cutting consumption:
1. When we buy our next car, we are thinking about setting a goal of buying a car that gets better gas mileage; not worse. This is making us think about getting another station wagon or a sedan instead of a mini-van.
2. We are thinking about buying cloth totes to use when we go grocery shopping. Sounds kind of far-fetched or “geeky” to many? I’ve always thought so, too. But in an after-Christmas clean out at our house, I tossed nearly 100 plastic grocery bags. There is no way that we could ever reuse that many of the bags.
3. Buying more dish cloths, rags and cloth napkins so that we can use fewer paper napkins and paper towels.
These are all challenging (that’s why we’re wrestling with them), but cutting consumption is an important “spiritual” discipline that develops contentment in the hearts of Christians. It teaches us how to appreciate what God has given us.
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