Giving Something Away

So my small group (Evangelical speak for "Bible Study Group") has been reading the book I mentioned before by Richard Foster; The Freedom of Simplicity. In it, Foster writes about John Wesley, the 18th century cleric and founder of the Methodist Movement, who as a young man calculated that he could live on 25 pounds, or $65 per year. Even when he earned 1400 pounds a year later in his career, he continued to subsist on that 25 pounds and gave the rest away. Foster, no slouch in the pragmatics department, recognizes that we obviously have to allow for growing families and expenses. But he says the principle should remain the same.


So what does this have to do with our small group? Well, we love a challenge, plain and simple. So we challenged each other to give something away; something that was meaningful but not essential. Then we met at our house last night to debrief. Here's what we came up with:

John and Suvia had one of their cars totaled in an accident days after we issued the challenge. They decided that rather than replace it, John would ride his bike to work and that the family would make do with one car. No big deal, some might say. Try cycling through a foot of snow in the Prince George's County back roads. Pretty impressive.


Jean, a confessed shopaholic, recruited a friend and together, they combed Jean's closets, getting rid of something like 75 items of clothing. She held up a particular favorite that she'd brought along to the meeting; a velvety black, tailored collarless jacket that would have slimmed the bulkiest of frames. It was an elegant number, subtly embroidered and ready for a night out. Goodbye jacket. Good for Jean.

Josh is Jean's husband and is nothing if not calm and methodological. He walked us through a list of things he might give up, a list which he maintained on his smart phone, a Droid he got for a newly acquired job. The first item on the list? The Droid. But his arguments for keeping the Droid were sound. So the Droid would stay (for where else would he keep his list of things to give up?). Also staying - his ipod, his five suits that he needed for work, and some other stuff. So his conclusion was that he had nothing that he could reasonably and meaningfully give up. ("But he hardly has anything to start with!" Jean reminded us as he put his Droid carefully back into his pocket.)



My husband, Mark, suggested that the tv in our bedroom be jettisoned for quiet evenings of reading in bed. Huh. Guess I'll just have to watch my "Office" re-runs downstairs as he reads quietly in bed.

And me? Well, earlier in the day, I'd met Alex for lunch, and I told her about this challenge of ours. To my surprise she didn't immediately mock it as a largely academic exercise designed to make ourselves feel better, but instead thought seriously about what she would give up. So then I started to feel like maybe I hadn't taken the challenge seriously enough. I half-heartedly mentioned my ipod. "You could give it to me," she kindly volunteered. "No." I gently responded.

As I left her, I still had no grand ideas about what to give away. I began to comfort myself by saying that maybe I took the challenge too seriously, and planned to report back to my small group with this sober announcement; "I don't think I'm ready for this." But I knew that wouldn't cut water with this crew. So I said I would give up the yearning I had for a very specific set of kitchen knives that I had my eye on. Easy enough since that wasn't giving anything away, really. As evidence, I presented the coupon for the knives that I'd cut from a catalog and symbolically threw it in the re-cycling bin. I admitted to my small group that this was a huge cop-out, and no one argued with me.

But it has made me think. I mean, going back to Foster and his recommendations, my contribution to the challenge was worse than a cop out. It was a downright refusal to participate. Here Wesley gave away all but 25 pounds of his salary, even when he was earning 56 times that. And I couldn't think of one thing I cared to part with. Don't get me wrong, I get rid of stuff all the time. Perhaps no one has helped Purple Heart out more than I have. But that's not the point of the challenge. Anyone would be happy to give away what they don't want. What does it say about you when you're not particularly willing to go beyond that?