Podcasts

OK. I’ve finally gotten some broadband internet.

Anyone have any suggestions for podcast receivers, pod catchers, or whatever they’re called? Let me know and thanks.

Save More

This is the second part of our series on frugality. Last week I wrote about how we discovered that we were bleeding cash. Today we’re going to work on that theme some more with probably the best tip for saving some money right now. I don’t know anyone who’s not crunched for cash right now. Milk is about four dollars a gallon. Do you have any idea how much milk four kids can drink a week? It’s crazy. But it has to be bought unless we want to go buy some cows and frankly I’m not ready for that. Getting up at three a.m. to feed babies or change diapers is hard enough. Milking the cow everyday would be way over the top.

One of the ways we began to fix the holes in our grocery budget was to stop eating out. I left this hanging out there yesterday, but the secret is that you can get by without going out to eat at all. Let that one sink in for a moment. Three meals a week for the cost of twenty one is what we’re faced with here. The big question, if we go out, is what are we going to do about the other eighteen meals? Starve? Kill our own meat? Of course not, we’re going to pony up the other hundred or so dollars a week for groceries so we can cook those other eighteen meals. This effectively doubles our grocery budget for the year and let me tell you we can flat put away the groceries.

The solution to this for us was spending time together. That’s all it took. With a little time spent together with my spouse—which is nice, actually, and hard to come by otherwise—we manage to get by on about a hundred bucks a week in groceries. This time is spent doing menu planning, writing a grocery list with what we need to cook those meals, and finding coupons. We’re about to start ‘comping’ sale ads too. We sit down together each week with a pile of cookbooks and our recipes and the calendar—as awful as that is—and decide what we’re going to eat for that week and what we have time to cook. Usually we can get by with two or three recipes with leftovers plus whatever can scrounge up on the weekend. It really depends on the week. Either way, for the cost of three or four trips through the fast food line I can cook all week for my family of six: Healthy, good, hot meals that never sat under a heat lamp or languished in a deep fryer.

Next I’m going to discuss some things that torpedo my resolve when it comes to begin frugal and what I can do to help prevent it.

Oh please.

I’m not a member of the Mark Driscoll Fan Club any preacher talking like that in the pulpit around here would probably get tossed over hand out the back door. But thats here in the Bible belt.

But here’s a whole world away from Seattle Washington. If my home county was paved over and you stacked folks three deep over the surface the population might get as high as Seattle. And the inhabitants aren’t nearly as nice there as they are down here. They’re a rough crowd. But they need Jesus. How about this, rather than griping and fussing about how they do it up there, lets go on up there and start a ‘proper’ church with elders–if you can find any who are qualified–and the whole shebang and see how long it lasts.

I can see the other side of this to, so don’t get me wrong. The same issues apply. Is there any real disciple making going on? Have they, as the Hindus did, just imported Jesus into their ‘groove’? I’m not actually in a position to respond to these questions because I have never been to Seattle or preached there–which can only be a whole different experience than it is here in Oklahoma.

I like Tim Challies ‘trajectory’ comment. I think it fits and I think it reminds us to remove the logs before we pluck at the splinters.

I have to think of the demon possessed man that Jesus healed, then left behind. Do I know why he did that? Nope. But I’ll bet it was because he was the one who could minister to those folks best. You know, the pig raising Jews who were so upset over their lost profits that they asked him to leave. Face to face with Jesus…I can’t get a grip on that one. But the man who was healed could. Think about that one for a while then, rather than griping publicly, lets look around and see why we’re not reaching out to the folks where we live and why we’re not all about discipleship and planting churches and things.

I just read this and thought it applied.