thoughts from the deep recesses

The door to our apartment building When we began working with the travel agent who arranged our tickets for our trip to Sierra Leone, we were originally hoping to be able to go through London. We have dear friends who live in Northern Ireland, and we were hoping to either pop over to visit them or that they would come to London to spend a few days with us. As we planned, though, we discovered that our friends were actually going to be in the States at the same time... so we told the travel agent to look at flights going through other European cities and just try to find us the best deal. When he came back with an itinerary flying through Paris, I got a wild hair... maybe we could save up enough money to be able to spend a few days in Paris with the kids. Knowing this would be the only trip like this we would ever get to take as a family, it seemed silly to get to Paris, only to spend a few hours in the airport and then fly on to Sierra Leone. I posed my idea to Asia and he agre

Reading this book right now... wish I could give a copy to everyone I know. 18 million people die each year because of extreme poverty... what are you doing to prevent that? We all shudder when we remember tragedies like the holocaust... but every day 27,000 children under the age of five die from PREVENTABLE causes... You can read the first chapter by clicking here. FIRST CHAPTER Then go to your local library and check it out instead of buying it. With the $14 you saved, why not make a donation to a charity that is working to alleviate world poverty? I know of a good one... Children of the Nations ! Sorry - I can't help myself. I will never spend my money the same way again... and I'm determined to challenge people to consider how our unnecessary spending could be reigned in and how that money could make a difference...

I rode Violet (my bike) to the library one sunny morning last week... after 3 1/2 weeks with the same reading material on the trip I was excited to look through the shelves and bring home some new inspiration. My first stop (as always) was the New Nonfiction shelf... There I found a book called Unstuff: Making Room in Your Life for What Really Matters . I turned it over to read the back and the author photo caught my eye... turns out I went to college with the guy from this husband/wife writing team. Intrigued, I threw the book in my basket. I read the book in a couple of days... it's a good read - perhaps a bit more for the Christian who's being introduced to the idea of over consumption as sin - but still full of good principles. I came away from the book with a challenge for my family: Every day for the month of August, each member of the family has to find ten things to get rid of. There are boxes set up in the kitchen labeled 'Trash', 'Sell' and '