I’ve just found your blog:)

I can feel Jesus inspiration…you are blessed!

by the way… do you believe in Angels?

Peace*

p.s – connecting from Portugal.

I think we need a balance as far as food, resources, material possession, power and money. Until we want to change this unbalancement of excess then we will all suffer from to much (FAT) and from not having ( starvation). We are sick from thinking
more is better. I believe it is a balance. And that God really loves us and enjoys giving us all the desires in our hearts. I think sometime God wants to spoil us but we think it is evil or we just do not deserve to recieve from God. Yes if we have excess than it is up to us or its our responsiblity to share it with others, thats if you want to.

As far as Jesus he has or had his opinon.He is a tough one. Always making me think out of the box.

God Bless
Maria

I think this statement hits it for a lot of us. We tend to think that possessing something makes it a blessing, even though we often “take” things without asking God if He really wants us to have it. I wrote a little bit about this here:

http://pezmama.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-blessings.html

I think it is good to consider that needs are different for different people. For example, we used cloth diapers on our first two children. We adopted our third when she was 9 months old, and tried to switch her over to cloth. It was a horrible transition. She squirmed and wiggled and cried, cried, cried. We were already having some other adjustment/attachment issues with her and for that situation, we really needed to just use disposables while we worked through some other things. In my mind, the loss of her peace of mind wasn’t worth the cost to our budget and to the environment.

Yet, I think that in general, western Christians are much more blinded by our love of “stuff” than we’d like to admit. In the gospels’ teaching about the rich young man (Matt 19, Mark 10, Luke 18) Jesus tells him to sell everything he has and give to the poor. The man went away sad, because he was very rich, and stood to lose many possessions.

Whenever I hear teaching about this story, someone invariably askes “But doesn’t God want us to have nice stuff?” That’s how entrenched we are in materialism. We can’t even imagined being loved by someone (including God) without the love being expressed with “stuff.” In my mind, anyone who asks such a question is the very kind of person who DOES need to sell their stuff. If we can’t imagine being happy without it, then we are more attached than God wants us to be.

The Old Testament tells of the Levites, who were the priestly line of Israel. Unlike the other tribes of Israel, they were not given land to possess. After restating this in a previous verse, God explains in Ezekiel 44:28 that the Levites will have no possession because “I will be their possession.”

Believers in this age are called a “royal priesthood.” GOD is our possession. The rest is just fluff. How satisfied would we be if God was our only possession? That’s a hard question to ask, but one that I think God wants us to.

Too often the joy that we often talk about as Christians is really joy over our stuff. That sounds just like the rest of the world – pursuing happiness through stuff. Why would nonbelievers be atracted to our joy when it’s really no different than theirs?

How much supernatural power would flow out of us if the rest of the world saw all these Christians completely unconcerned and unencumbered by stuff, yet living lives that were inexplicably joyful and productive?

Now I’m rambling. Sorry.

With that being said, this particular post really struck home with me. I lost my job 8 months ago and I’ve really learned what I “need” and what I “want” in this life. I lived on less and loved these past 8 months. They have been the eye opener that I needed. I reconnected with my church, volunteered, find all kinds of ways to make money here and there (focus groups, selling on ebay etc). Its actually been FUN!!!!!! A concept I had long ago forgotten about.

If you would have told me a year ago I would loose my job and not work for 8 months and everything would still be ok, I would not have believed you. I was way too tied up in what I WANTED and let that and money control my life.

I can honestly tell you I have a completely new perspective that I was in desperate need of. Thanks for your posts. I look forward to more inspiring reading

But, see, this is one of the BIG problems with trying to peer into the lives of others and make judgments. It might appear to us that someone with a LOT of money might use their money more effectively…but perhaps God’s not interested in what’s most efficient or effective from our standpoint. What seems wasteful to us 1) might not seem so to God and 2) God can still use for good.

Good friends of my mom’s, both doctors, spent a lot of their lives accumulating wealth. And now they send other doctors (as well as themselves) on mission trips around the world and they’ve just bought a game farm in S Africa to start a ministry/orphanage for AIDS orphans. I’d imagine that, to most, their years of just getting more and more money probably seemed excessive.

You know, there’s a guy who drives around DM in what we call the God Truck. It has Bible quotes all over it and he blares Come to Jesus messages over a bullhorn as he drives around. I’ve often thought that was a huge waste of money, effort, and time. But yet, if the man who drives it feels sincerely led to do so by God…who am I to judge? If his efforts bring just one person to Christ, was it a waste?

I think what it comes down to is that our focus should be on what direction God is giving us…not on whether we or others have enough or too much or not enough.