the cultural stronghold of stuff

For a better reference of understanding, you may want to start reading with the first two posts in this series on cultural strongholds:
1)  Cultural Strongholds
2)  The Cultural Stronghold of Being in Control

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A theme of our past year has been purging the "stuff" in our lives. Last July, we left on our traveling adventure with 4 suitcases, a stroller, and 3 car seats, which actually isn't that much when you consider that we would be gone for 9 months. One of our main goals was to live simply, in every sense of the concept. We began with our physical needs, buying only what we needed and traveling light. With that in mind, we still managed to collect plenty along the way including every kind of winter clothing, assorted toys, bicycles, a coffee maker (because we kept showing up in new places that didn't have one and caffeine remained at the top of the "need" list), school supplies, stuffed animals, and of course, mementos from every touristy place we visited.

The problem was that we had to keep moving, literally. Each time a new change came along, we had to reconfigure our collection so that it could all fit into our car (what I consider the size of a small SUV.) If you've ever taken a road trip with children, then you understand this was not an easy task. We were already living with only the bare essentials, so anything we allowed ourselves to collect felt either necessary or meaningful.

We discussed other options, like boxing things up to ship to the U.S., or buying a luggage container for the roof of the car, but those options felt like compromises to our original goal to live simply. Anyone can buy more storage space, but it was the discipline of regularly purging a lot of stuff we liked that began to shape our character. With the size of our car as the limiting factor, we repeatedly opened ourselves up to redefining the difference between our needs and our wants.

In the process of packing up monthly, sometimes weekly, I often found there was something I had trouble letting go of. There were all kinds of reasons for wanting to keep things... memories, fear of future need, comfort, not wanting to waste money and buy the same thing again later. It was strange to find that certain items had almost a physical hold on me, and I struggled to justify keeping them.

What surprised me every time was the feeling that overcame me when I finally decided to let an item go, sometimes only after a disagreement with my husband about the importance of said item. I expected sadness, or regret, or loss. Every time, I was overcome instead by the feeling of freedom.

Anything we will ever own is accompanied by a lie we find easy to believe. The lie comes in many variations, but the crux of the lie is to elevate the importance of the object in our lives. It tells us that we need this particular item for happiness or comfort or ease, and letting go of it will harm us in some way. That lie is a well-established stronghold, and we become slaves to it when we can't let things go.

The truth I understand better than ever is that letting go of things brings me freedom, and therefore ownership brings the opposite of freedom. I can see it in the contrast of my two lives, one much simpler than another. Part of the lie I bought is that all of these things purpose to make my life easier in some way, but I will tell you that a bigger house takes longer to clean, and requires purchasing more furniture to fill more rooms, and becomes a time vacuum in the effort to maintain all those things. The more toys my kids own, the more toys get spread around the house throughout the day, and the more time it takes to pick up those toys every evening, assuming they get picked up. Bigger, newer, and more does not equate to better.

All of the stuff just adds to the burden of investing more and more in myself, me, and the things I own. Very few items I own represent time or money invested in issues that impact an eternal level. The minute I take even a small step backwards to look at a bigger picture, the "stuff" in my life doesn't matter. For this reason I find it supremely unfulfilling.

I share this in my effort to reconcile the difference between two extreme worlds. While the reality of our lives as travelers could be pared down to a few suitcases, the realities of our lives back at home inevitably include a lot more ownership. Yes, it can be viewed as good stewardship, and part of being a responsible adult, and despite the picture I just painted, I don't actually believe it is wrong to own things... I just wonder how we can practice ownership in a way that is honors an eternal perspective?

One conviction we want to live by is that whatever we own we should be sharing. Own a car? Go out of your way to pick people up in it. Own a house? Invite people to it. Own a set of china dishes? Eat on them with good friends, and maybe even small children. Maybe. Own a lot of good books? Loan them out and don't worry about whether you get them back. We can remain in a healthy status with our things as long as they don't begin to be the owners of us. Sometimes we don't realize we have bought the lie until we have trouble sharing or letting go.

Our normal California lives will never have to fit into one of our vehicles, but that season practicing simplicity in the discipline of purging will not go wasted. I feel especially glad for the victories I've seen in the lives of my children, as one child in particular comes from the variety that cannot throw away her straw from a restaurant but instead wants to keep it in a special box in her room, filled with other such junk. Eek! At the end of our trip, watching her freely choose toys to give away was part of an ending I never expected.

Behind the letting go is freedom from the stronghold of material things and the false sense of security they provide. In letting go of things we can hold, we invite the same freedom to filter into other parts of our life. Living simply is a philosophy for more than the stuff we collect, but also for our emotional hang ups, our circumstances, our relationships, our whole lives. This is the miracle of breaking a stronghold.

the cultural stronghold of being in control

Last week I talked about the idea of cultural strongholds that we are often blind to living in the U.S.A. You can read a more detailed explanation about them here. Accepted parts of our culture can
become strongholds in a believer's life that are hard to identify. That's one of the deceptive powers of a stronghold.

My family and I may have moved to Switzerland for part of last year, but our bigger journey was the one of surrender that started well before we left the U.S. It began in the quiet places of our heart with a simple willingness to be pushed a little bit outside of what felt comfortable. With each baby step, there was a letting go process that required surrendering many previously unidentified fears and expectations. Over the course of the year, we were gradually stripped of so many things that we considered safety zones. 

Through the stripping process, piece by piece, layer by layer, we began to see the value of living a little less in control of our lives. It was a little more surrendered to a God who knew just how to move the pieces around. It required a lot of trust in Him because the pieces were always landing in a way that didn't necessarily make sense, but the end was also far better than we might have imagined.

Coming back home after this unique year, I am surprised to hear so much limitation in the voices of friends talking about basic decisions that are made. There is an amount of measured control, and I hear the sounds of holding back out of fear or anxiety. Over and over I hear the wonderful, well-meaning people around me limiting themselves to all of the things that make them comfortable, or that give them a sense of routine, or that offer security in some form. Whatever seems safe is viewed as a decision made in "wisdom"... but it isn't wisdom unless God is intricately involved in the process. And it can't be confirmed as the best decision if it is actually made out of fear.

The school example comes to mind, because how many of us have felt paralyzed when deciding where to enroll our first child into kindergarten? There are so many options, and all of them seem to involve putting our babies into school with ravenous wolves. There is stigma against public school, and snobbery among private schoolers, and defensive tendencies among home school families, because after all, everyone who isn't homeschooling has a conflicting opinion. I had a friend recently tell me all about the plan she had for her child's future through school, beginning with kindergarten on up through college. There is nothing that can make me feel more inadequate than a conversation with a woman who has a plan that reaches farther into the future than my plan does.

The thing is that there isn't just one way. It does matter where and how our children are schooled, and there isn't a one size answer that fits all. Whether it is schooling, or which side of town to live on, or which job to take, many of life's biggest decisions inherently have no moral right or wrong, and yet the choices matter immensely.

It isn't the choices, or circumstances, or upcoming changes that my dearest friends are experiencing that troubles me, it is the habitual inflexibility I hear while confronting some of life's big decisions. I hear this constantly limiting language used, and I readily admit to having said most of myself at one time. I hear it in the "I could never"s...
"I could never move to that side of town"...
"I could never leave this house that we have lived in for so long"...
"I could never learn to do that at this point in my life"...
"I could never uproot my children"...

We control our lives by limiting them. 

Every time we limit ourselves, we actually limit God. We cripple His ability to lead us somewhere. Maybe He wants to whisper softly that our child could be a light in the local public school. Or maybe He wants to challenge us to be become people who stretch beyond our natural personality and gift set... just so He can step in and provide the strength and abilities we need to do what He's asked. Maybe He wants to take us down a path that involves some hard work, or discomfort, or insecurity. Maybe He will lead us in a direction that will increase our dependence on Him rather than decrease it. Maybe.

Many of us who follow Jesus desire to live a life of big faith. We admire faith stories, and want to see God move mountains because we believed He could. But our lives in America have grown so comfortable, and predictable, so full of tangible security, that we have little left that we need to trust God for. After all, if I have already decided where the safest place to send my child to school is, then why do I need to exercise big faith?

Ironically, it feels harder to live surrendered in a setting that provides a lot of security. We are wired as human beings to seek out safety, and once we find it, to cling tightly to it. Comfortable things are just plain difficult to let go of. On the contrary, the more uncertainty or insecurity we are experiencing, the more likely we are to trust God with it. Hard things are easier to surrender to a God who loves us, because we just plain don't have any other choice.

Our lives are pretty easy here in 21st century America. But we still live with a lot of limitations, like parameters around with what we are willing to trust Jesus. It is a deception to believe that being in control is all about making decisions out of wisdom. It may instead be making decisions out of fear. That, my friend, is a stronghold.

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"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Psalm 111:10
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My challenge is to ask God today, with lots of prayer and an open mind, to reveal an area where fear, rather than wisdom, is dictating your decisions. A challenge to identify and begin to crumble a stronghold.

cultural strongholds

It has taken the whole of last month to settle back into our California home, with all of the unpacking and reconnecting and catching up on the duties of property ownership. Now school, and temporary work, and the sketching of plans that come next but still remain too uncertain to sit comfortably in them.

There was certainly some culture shock upon reentry to our old lifestyle, and I am finding that as the stereotypes suggest, everything is indeed bigger in America. We can't find enough laundry for a full load in these luxurious washing machines. Many trips to Costco have not filled up my giant refrigerator. And my daily errands feel a lot farther away than they used to... can I possibly be remembering wrong? We miss walking to the grocery store every other day, but we are also happy to be sleeping in our own beds after eating a delicious plate of Mexican food.

While the "shock" portion of reentering American culture is already fading, I am fighting desperately to hang onto all of the cultural revelations. We had a rare opportunity to have our eyes opened to the way things have always been done. I don't want to forget what I see now that I have never seen before.

Often as a discipline of embracing new or renewed truth in my own life, I write about it. Processing all that I have learned about myself as a follower of Jesus over the course of this past year has taken longer than I expected, but finally, I am reaching some articulate thoughts. Over the next month or so I am challenging myself to write a little bit more, sharing here a series of cultural strongholds that my eyes have been newly opened to. These are a few aspects of our culture that now stand out in sharp contrast to the way that we were living overseas, and I can see how they are crippling to our culture.

Ancient strongholds were fortresses set up against the attack of enemy armies. I picture some of the crumbling castles that we visited in the medieval towns of Europe, often on the crest of a hilltop, surrounded by a fortified wall. It was a good defense and took a lot to tear those walls down. When the whole land surrendered to invaders, these strongholds firmly resisted.

When God invades our life we can surrender it to Him willingly and still withhold areas for ourselves, like strongholds. Within that surrendered life, we manage to maintain a lot of fortified walls... some out of self-protection, some out of fear of the unknown, or some walls that we simply refuse to see because they blend in so smoothly with our surroundings. It has never been His way to take our lives by force.

Cultural strongholds are unsurrendered areas that appear repeatedly among person after person in a particular culture. They stem from aspects so accepted in our culture that when a person turns her life over to Jesus, the cultural stronghold remains unnoticed, just like that well-disguised fortified wall. And yet, living a surrendered life means that every piece of it should get turned over when God invades.

The saying goes that "ignorance is bliss", but I wouldn't feel convicted about sharing all of this if I believed we were better off not knowing. Withholding some areas from heavenly influence might sound tempting, more comfortable, easier, but it doesn't make our lives better.

We have a lot of growing problems in the U.S. like anxiety, and addictions, and the break down of the family unit, and teen suicide. Big and broken things that often affect Believers as statistically often as non-Believers. I can't help wondering if we could change that by revealing and surrendering some of our strongholds.

Our life overseas living in foreign countries was very simple, full of humbling and hard experiences, and challenging on every level. It included many adventures but lacked any frills. The part I miss the most is our utter dependence on God for each decision that we made.

There are four specific areas of my own life where strongholds were revealed and broken, and I am fighting to keep them from succumbing to cultural norms now that we are once again living in a setting where they are completely acceptable. Join me (in what I hope is a weekly post) over the next month to read a little more about these areas as I see them. And pray for me as I put them into words as I will pray for those who read this.

Next time: The cultural stronghold of being in control