I have been reading "The Hole in our Gospel" by Richard Stearns with my bible study. He is the president of World Vision and it is all about poverty and what we are really missing as the Church. The biggest realization I have had in reading this book is how desensitized I have become to poverty. I realize that though I care about it I do nothing in my day to day life to help or change things. I rarely think about it and never do things to learn about and help poverty. I wonder how many of us are desensitized to it. I wonder if we could wake up and make one small step what kind of difference it would make.

I have also spent a lot of time thinking about how I live my life. I figured out today that while Faith and John were living here the 4 of us were using about 150 gallons of water A DAY!! Isn't that insane. And yet some people have none, and what they do have they have to haul from a source to their house just to get clean. I can't even imagine. As some of you know I cherish my baths. I love taking them and i take them all the time. I decided that it would be good for me to give them up. They use so much water and maybe in the tiniest way I can start to live a little more responsibly and with a little less. So I said I won't take a bath until the first of the year. About 6 months. I will still take showers but I know I will save a lot of water and will be foregoing something that is comforting and fun--and a HUGE luxury to a lot of the world.

I have just been so challenge to live on less. We already live on little and yet I know there is so much more we could go without. Even the amount of food that we eat. Mark and I eat on about 8 dollars a day. So 4 dollars a person a day. It seems like so little. You can't eat a meal at McDonalds for that. BUT we have so much more food than we need. I know we eat more than we need and I also know that we don't eat everything we have before it goes bad.

All of this though can be so frustrating because I often wonder...how I live...does it matter? Am I changing anything? Today I decided that I know if we live on less then we have extra money and I know we can give that to sponsoring a child or to some other ministry and that makes a difference. The key is doing something--anything with the extra. Not using what we save to buy us more things or for us to go somewhere but to feed the world and do SOMETHING.

What can you live without? Or what could you live on less of? Think about it...Im sure there is something!