Apartment renovations

This week, our apartment has been a buzz of activity. To start, the outside work on the front side of our apartment got completed on Monday or Tuesday. This allowed us to be able to get the green artificial turf on our outside balcony from storage and reinstall it. From there, we were able to organize the balcony with shelves, plants, etc. that have been in our outside entry hallway and/or in the corner of our living room.

Last Saturday I purchased more bookshelves and storage units from IKEA. Two of these bookshelves are now in the corner of our living room and will contain items cluttering up our living room. Some more went into our bedroom and the kids' room.

On Tuesday, we worked very hard at rearranging furniture and stuff in our new bedroom. As she has been throughout this whole process, Jeanette was a huge help. Without her and the YWAM team last week from Helsinki, I don't see how we could have done all these renovations.

Now that the older 2 kids are in the bigger bedroom, it really seems to make a difference. Eventually our 3rd child will move into there as well.

I personally don't get that excited about having material "stuff" around in most cases. I'm not super attached to the majority of what material things fill this apartment. I think we've tried to spend wisely on the stuff we have here now.

Cameron Strang had an excellent and very challenging column in the current issue of Relevant Magazine. In his column "First Word," he titled this article "Letting Go" and wrote about some personal downsizing that he and his wife had done. The article starts with these words:

About a year ago, my wife Maya and I moved into a beautiful big house we
built just two miles outside of downtown Orlando. It's in a large new
development that has everything you'd want: shops and restaurants, new
schools, beautiful parks and an incredibly strict homeowner's association that
keeps everything just a little too nice.

Our house itself overlooks a 75-acre park that has trails, fountains, ball
fields, basketball courts and lakes. In many ways, it's the idyllic
American dream--which is probably why it's surprising a lot of our friends and
family that we're selling.

Something has happened in us during this last year that's shifted our
priorities. I think we just woke up one day and realized that, like when
you get too fat for your favorite jeans, the life we were living no longer fit
us.

Though our finances are technically fine and we're still tithing and giving
each month, we found ourselves simply financially maintaining. We were
working as hard as ever, but the lion's share of our income was going to the
house.

If your lifestyle is a representation of your heart, and where you spend
your money is a barometer of your priorities, then we were completely out of
whack. An undue amount of our resources was being spent on chasing the
American dream, and that isn't how we want to spend our lives.

We want to have more freedom with our time and finances, so if God prompts
us to give, or take time off to do something we're not planning for, we might be
living conservatively enough to have the freedom to do it. The last thing
we want is to be restrained from following God because we have to make another
mortgage payment.

We're in a season of life where we're desiring greater simplicity,
community, freedom and outward living. We want to position our lives in a
way that when people see us, they see the values of Christ reflected in the ways
we spend our time and money. Not to gain anyone's approval, but because
our lifestyle is simply an accurate representation of our heart.