My wife and I have been studying more on how to live holistically honoring God - love Him with our heart, soul, mind, strength. Like Deuteronomy 6, we want to wrap His ways around our arms, tie them on our foreheads, nail them to our doorpost.

In this, we've been on the journey to green our home. The funniest thing happened when we were shopping on an American website for energy saving gadgets. They had a hand crank puree maker that I really wanted to make mashed potatoes with. I asked my wife if I could get it. She said she had left hers (she had one? wow) in Guatemala (where she's from) and that everyone had one back there. And come to think of it, all the things we've been looking at on the green website shop are in place in the 3rd world.

They have tons of gadgets that work w/o electricity. And since Guatemala doesn't have coal, they've been using low energy compact fluorescents for years. They have gardens that they eat from. They eat fresh produce that's pretty organic. And in all of that - I wonder what else the third world has been doing for so long that they need to teach to us 1st worlders.

I used to think it was so terrible that we couldn't drink the water from the faucets in Guatemala. But then again, third worlders must think it strange that we literally flush drinking water down the toilet. We first world people call this superior infrastructure. Third worlders could easily say it's just a bunch of waste.

Lately, my wife taught me how to make recycled paper. Woah! so cool! We've been recycling for a while now through the conventional recycle dumpsters - but now we're starting to get the rest of that mantra -Reduce and Reuse.

We've turned an old plastic parmesan cheese bottle into a shaker for our homemade (and safe) scouring cleaner. We used old bottles to plant plants in (the ultimate defiance, I think) and to hold our homemade all-purpose cleaner. We're reducing the amount of food we buy that requires a ton of packaging, too. That means buying larger quantities sometimes. It also means not buying some stuff that has a ton of superfluous plastic and paper packaging.

It feels like we're a little freer in being simpler and more self-sufficient. I hope we don't forget that God is our sufficiency, not ourselves. But like I told my wife, I hope we can learn enough to be self-sufficient and green that we could leave the system of this world if we needed to. We don't want to be hermits, but we don't want to be so much a part of the system that we are hopelessly bound to it.

Give this way some thought. And if you don't think you can honor God by treating His creation well, then perhaps the idea of stewardship of money will help. Green - is cheap. Uses less resources, you get less diseases... you get the idea. So honor God with stewarship if you can't be an environmentalist wacko.

Anyways, I'm loving going through a little 1st world development, getting back to simpler ways. I'm so blessed to have a wife who actually likes the journey we're on to honor the Lord God with all of ourselves. May we bring glory to Him, and that's all. And may we all be a part of the Kingdom where Jesus is Lord, not the system.

We have a little urban gardening experiment going on with trash and plants: (the links are to photos on our shapevine account)

http://tr.im/lettuce
http://tr.im/AvMo

Made this bag using elements that were going to be thrown away:

http://tr.im/courierbag