Barack or Social Principles...

Tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 2, I have a tough decision to make. Barack Obama will be having an event at the community center less than two blocks from my house. At the same time, our church starts the series "Social Principles of the United Methodist Church."

Decisions, Decisions.

I have been busy posting with my dad on the fireside, but I will have lots of stuff to talk about this week. (not just politics and social principles, either) Stay tuned...

redrawing the map...

I have revamped the list of spiritual disciplines at the right. I got ahold of a copy of "Celebration of Disciplines," by Richard Foster, and have been trying to get more focused and specific. The first four are what Foster would describe as inward disciolines. The next five are the disciplines and the last four are hte outward discilplines, and the last four are the corporate disciplines. I started the Disciple II bible study last night, so I have some extra accountability in the area of study, and I have found a partner to begin fishing with, which I hope to learn as a tool to accomplish several of the other disciplines. I am realizing that the most powerful tool in exercising these disciplines is rhythm (or routine, however you wish to define it for yourself) and I am going to woek on finding my own rhythm in the next few weeks. So much to do, so much to do.

Right now, its off to the park with the kids.

small plates and red meat...

I want to address some issues that I brought up in earlier posts about food and budgeting. I talked about soem approaches to being intentional about what we eat, including using smaller plates and only eating red meat on Fridays. I have discovered that there are some logistics to those decisions that make them hard to implement. For instance, we only have five small plates, and the kids usually get two of them. That means that Dawn and I get two and there is one left. Following alright, I take it? If we don't do dishes in between meals (which occasionally is allowed to happen), then we don;t have enough dishes. Then we go back to big plates and soon we just skip the littel plates altogether. So, I just have to keep at it and remember that using nig plates with small portions still works. But, its hard. When we tried to do red meat Fridays, we found that we had leftover meat from Friday which, on our tight budget, we could let go to waste, so we had to find a time to eat it in the following days. Then, we were invited to a cookout where there were only hamburgers and hot dogs. I could argue that hot dogs can hardly be classified as meat, but that wouldn't serve the purpose of being intentional. So, once we broke the rule a couple of times and instituted some exceptions, it didn't really stick. We are still evaluating our budget and trying to find ways to simplify, but I don't think that small plates and red meat Fridays are going to be part of the regiment. We have lots of food right now, so i am going to try and get to the end of the month without buying anything but milk and bread. We spent about $155 on food in the first week ( we did buy a couple of expensive things like salmon fillets that we didn't have last month), so we will end up closer to $200 probably for September.

The scripture reading is going well, thoug I have skipped a few days (mostly just wrapped up in this online stuff), but I am getting into a routine and it is getting easier to do it first thing in the morning. I think that I will find a way to start looking at solitude as a regular part of my sppiritual diet. One idea is to start fishing on Saturday mornings, so that I can have our fish (reducing our grocery budget) and spen some quiet time alone.

Other ideas?

I have been reading daily in my Bible. All is well there. I have been reading Matthew in th New Living Translation. I think I'll try and have a podcast about biblical translations sometime soon, if anyone wants to try a conference call with me. I am also reading some texts on the Methodist Church, of which Dawn and I are members. We are transferring our membership from Texas to the church down the street. I am researching the social principles and the doctrinal statements because I am considering a course to become a licensed local pastor. I am very interested in what everyone thinks about that. I feel like I need to continue studying in a larger context the stuff that I have been reading lately. If I am raising questions and challenging the beliefs of my family, I think that I need to do it within a structure that provides some direction and that I can rely on to ground me in a faith system that I know and trust. I haven't signed up for anything yet, but I have been checking it all out and want to make a decision soon.

In other news, the grocery budget struggle continues. It turns out we are not as good at it as I had expected us to be. In other words, I am not as good at it. It is easy to sit around here and type and go on and on about sacrifice and the things I am going to do to practice it, it is another thing altogether to change my behaviors and the things that I understand about eating and feeding my family. There is a strong force in our culture that suggests that food comes first, so buy the good stuff and then budget the rest. Food is such an enormous part of our life and routine, and not just sustenance food, I'm talking about gourmet cooking and "eating right," that it is hard to think in terms of spending less money on it. i will have updates on how much we are spending, but for now you can rest easy knowing that we are already over budget.

yikes.