Happy New Year!
* January 1st :: What a perfect time for this Christmastide experiment!
Make a list of EVERYTHING you got or Christmas. Add it up, take some inventory.
Now think of what you can give away that would equal what you got!
Maybe this experiment goes beyond just what you got for Christmas. Maybe you start to evaluate your abundance in other areas of your life. How many extras of this or that do you have? How much extra time to spend doing this or that?
Add it up and give it away!
Personally i’m thinking about how much time I spend watching TV and drinking coffee at the coffee shop. How can I add up that time and that money and give away the equivalent. Maybe part of “giving it away” is spending time to serve to the poor or someone in need. Maybe it’s giving someone I know who is struggling in some way a $50 Starbucks gift card. There’s a million ways i could do it but i want to give it away to those in need and in turn, and most importantly, to God.
You get the idea.
ADD IT UP — GIVE IT AWAY
(Add it up, take inventory of your life and start thinking of ways to give it away this year!)
“Incarnation' does not originally mean (as it tends to today in some theologies of history, and in some kinds of Anglican today) that God took all of human nature as it was, put his seal of approval on it and thereby ratified nature as revelation. The point is just the opposite; that God broke through the borders of man’s definition of what is human, and gave a new, formative definition in Jesus.”
― John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus
Mark 8:34-37 (The Message Bible)
“Calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for? “If any of you are embarrassed over me and the way I’m leading you when you get around your fickle and unfocused friends, know that you’ll be an even greater embarrassment to the Son of Man when he arrives in all the splendor of God, his Father, with an army of the holy angels.”
Mark 8:34-37 (NIV)
”34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37 Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”