Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Baby Steps


I was just listening to one of my favorite bands of all time, Dogwood. A great Christian band and as I was listening and trying to do homework, one of their songs really caught my ear so I looked up the lyrics and listened to it again. The song form their 7th album, "Selfish Americans" talks about how as Americans we have so much and how we know that there are people out in the world with great problems and living in poverty and we just disregard it all. Here is part of the lyrics from the end of the song that I really like:

"Recognize their plight.
Take a look at them.
We take for granted our God given freedom;
They’ve got nothing our there.
We need to lend an unselfish hand,
commit ourselves to serve.
There’s so much we have – we don’t know what to do,
and the answer is already there."

I know we cannot help out everyone, but as Americans we rent storage areas to store all our crap! People around the world have the clothes on their backs and whatever else can fit in their little houses. We need to rethink through our priorities of what we really NEED and what is it that we just WANT. I commend the guys who are not buying any clothes for a whole year, I am not putting a time period on it cause I don't know what the future holds, but I am going to try as well not to. I have so many clothes that I cannot close my dresser draws where my shirts are and I have no more room to hang things up in my closet so I went through and bagged up my excess clothes and am giving them away. I am proud of Andrew and Matt for doing the same. I love all these guys for not just selling out to society, but for actually acting on their beliefs.

I know I sound real radical, even to myself, but this is all true. We have more stuff than we really need. Andrew basically told me once that in order to really change our lives we would need to make a drastic change in our life. I am deathly afraid of change, but am taking baby steps towards it.

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