More, or Less?

I just had one of those moments, the kind where you completely loose control of the well of emotions within yourself.  The kind where you are blubbering and crying and can't hold it in anymore.  And while those moments were a fairly frequent thing in our early marriage... they are quite uncommon in the past several years.

For the past four and a half years we have lived a fairly typical American life.  My husband has a job, we have a couple cars and a motorcycle, though I must admit, they are far from new! We live in a three bedroom house with a fenced backyard, in a good neighborhood. We have a church, and we have friends, our kids have friends whom they have known since birth.  We are settled.

Yet despite being "settled" we are quite unsettled. We have a yearning in our hearts for more, or is it less?  I guess it just depends on how you look at it.  More in many ways I suppose.  More time studying God's Word, more time with our kids, more outreach, more experiencing real life together as a family.  However, in order to have more of one thing, you must always have less of something else. You only have so much time in the day.  So in order to have more, we choose to have less.  Less stuff.  Less distractions.  Less internet.

We tell our children all the time that people are more important than things.  Yet we don't have time to spend with our family because we are always trying to clean up our house that is full of "things." We don't want to spend all our time cleaning.  We don't want to spend our time looking hopelessly for a matching pair of shoes.  We want to spend our time thoroughly enjoying our family, and genuinely praising and honoring our God.

We feel the need to take a huge step back and examine our lives.  We want to spend time devoted to studying God's Word and not just while we're exhausted and trying to "fit it in".  We don't want to be Christians who try to find time to fit God in.  We want to be on fire with a passionate love for God and to see people through His eyes.

So now, we examine.

We examine our hearts and minds and we look to see what we need less of, in order to have more of what we truly value most.