pressing on...

Well, we went to Aldi on Monday and spent $69 on food. That puts us about $47 over budget for the month. My goal was $1 per person per day, and we will have come out at about $1.39 per person per day. Some of the food will be left over, so we will just try it again next month. It looks like evaluating our food budget will be more of a process than an event.

My family and I are out of town for the weekend, so its not a good time to implement a new routine, but I think that i will begin a new morning ritual of reading in the Bible for 10 minutes and catching an audio chapter during the kids' afternoon nap. If you have never listened to a reading of the bible, I highly recommend it. I think that the original text was intended to be read out loud, since only a few would have been able to read it. The cadence, style, and even the repetitions seem to make more sense when I hear them spoken. Try it, you can find audio books of the Bible at the library usually. If not, you can download them for free here.

The dynamics of food budgets...

I am finding that eating on $120 is going to be more of a sacrifice than I had thought. We are already close to using up that amount. We spent $61 at Aldi at the beginning of the month. Then, I bought meat for our red meat Friday (more on that later), and spent $11 on meat and a cantaloupe. Then, I had to stop at Hy Vee for bread and milk, where I spent about $26. So, that's $98 and we are not even to the middle of the month. Plus, my wife has to take her lunch to work, so she basically eats two meals, breakfast and lunch, on her own. So, she is a single unit for about 35 0r 40 meals a month, and we lose a lot of the economy of feeding all four of us at the same time. We are still getting adjusted to Iowa living anyway, so this experiment may have to go on for a few months before we get it right. In the meantime, our conversations are very much about what we do with the money that we don't spend on food for ourselves. Josh is having a great conversation about that st the Eikon Project, so it will be interesting to see where it goes and what kinds of things we discover about the needs of our communities and the places where our excess might be put to better use than serving up over-indulgent meals to us.

I think that the next discipline will be reading scripture, because I need to find a routine with it and I can use the strength and wisdom to attack the rest of the list. Currently, I try to read one page a day, but its hit and miss, so I may need to re-examin that. I am still working on posting the reciepts, and I think that I will have my wife transcribe them for me and put them in a widget at the side of the blog. We'll see.

I will be seeing the housemates in Nashville in about 20 hourts and counting. Man, I can't wait. I love those folks.

I'm reading this book, "Stealing Jesus," and I extracted this quote from it. It was originally written by Houston Smith in a paper for The World Religions:

He invited them to see things differently, confident that if they did so their behavior would change accordingly. This called for working with people’s imaginations more than with their reason or their will. If listeners were to accept his invitation, the place to which they were being invited would have to seem real to them. So, because the reality his hearers were most familiar with consisted of concrete particulars, Jesus began with those particulars. He spoke of mustard seeds and rocky soil, of servants and masters, of weddings and wine. These specifics gave his teachings an opening ring of reality; he was speaking of things that were very much a part of his hearers’ worlds.

But having gotten them that far, having roused in them a momentum of assent, Jesus would then ride that momentum while giving its trajectory a startling, subversive twist. That phrase, “momentum of assent,” is important, for its deepest meaning is that Jesus located the authority for his teachings not in himself or in God-as-removed but in his hearers’ hearts. My teachings are true, he said in effect, not because they come from me, or even from God through me, but because (against all conventionality) your own hearts attest to their truth.

I love this passage, because I feel like we so often trivialize our faith into bumper sticker theologies and then invoke the name of Jesus to give what we say authority, when, in fact, the things that we say should have authority because they "are true...not because they come from me, or even from God through me, but because (against all conventionality) your own hearts attest to their truth."

This is a little off subject, and I will be posting our first grocery receipt later today, but I will be revisiting this topic a lot in the future. I am examining the ways that I understand my faith and the ways that I represent it, so close examination of language is essantial. But, hey, more on that later.

wow...

check out this article on our diets.