Hanging up the Clothes

I had a chance to catch a few minutes of Relevant Radio today and Dr. Mark Miravalle was discussing what we can do to help ourselves during this turbulent time - especially after the bad day on Wall Street today. He pointed out that many of us can take these turbulent times as a chance to evaluate where it is we get our peace from. Is it from the material world or is it from Jesus? One of the things he said we could do is to evaluate our lives and voluntarily enter into a more simple lifestyle. In our case, we have had to enter into this lifestyle on a not-so-voluntary basis.

One way we have chosen to cut back in these difficult times is to finally put up a clothes line. I know it is late in the clothes-hanging season, but at least I can save on a few less trips through the propane-eating dryer!

What I didn't expect from this change was the enthusiasm that my children expressed about actually hanging up wet clothes! Yesterday, due to much rain over the past week, was the first day we could hang our laundry and they actually were arguing about who would hang it up. After we "ironed out" the details as to who would actually be doing the hanging, some of the other kids felt it was necessary to go outside and watch while the laundry got hung :)

Amazing. I hope they keep up their enthusiasm. Today when they hung up the towel load they even organized it so that like items were hanging in the same area. My organizing genes must have gotten into some of them at least! I wish I would have thought to take a picture!

So often we think that by removing material things from the lives of our children we will be causing them pain and heartache, when in reality, maybe they can deal with it better than we can as adults. I know that my kids aren't really all that attached to the dryer, but it still amazed me how excited they were about the change. Maybe we should look to our children to see how they deal with change. We might just learn something.

God Bless!