The Journey

it all started about a year and a half ago, this shift in thinking. it crept up on us as we were in the process of buying our first home. and it hit us hard when we got said house, moved in, and starting living our new lives as homeowners. DEBT. the house, school, some stupid decisions, etc. we were determined to live debt free lives and enjoy the things we had rather than see them as a burden. i started listening to Dave Ramsey and getting serious about debt. i shared what i was learning with my husband and we decided to make some changes in our lives, get a "real" budget and start paying it all off.

in the process of paying everything off we began to see how important this new lifestyle was in relation to our relationship with God. we have been Christian's for a while now. my husband for 13 years and me for almost 8. we were quickly beginning to see how a cluttered life is distracting. when you are worried about paying off debt you become obsessed with it. we wanted to be better off for being debt-free and find a healthy balance between hating debt and obsessing over it. i should mention we were not in a terrible place, we weren't struggling to live, or pay or mortgage or anything like that. and if we continued down the route we were on we would have probably just ended up like most Americans with a balance on a credit card or two not thinking too much about it. but the point was we didn't want a balance on a credit card, or school loans, we wanted to have the freedom that comes with being debt free.

So we began the journey and started dreaming of a future sans debt. more time to do the things we loved, more money to do it, a future, more to give to causes we wanted to support. along this journey that we are still on (but we see the light at the end of the tunnel) we have learned that as we started shedding these small debts we were understanding more about God and ourselves. if we were responsible with the things God had given us, how much better and more rewarding our lives could be.

that journey in part lead us to a new one. a little over a month ago i went to a women's wellness conference. I've been to conferences before but most either focused on health or spirituality alone, but this conference brought both topics together. it only echoed what i had already been thinking, that every decision we make, or don't make, all these things are tied together from where we spend our money to how we treat our bodies. what if we could be debt free, healthy, and spiritual. what if being spiritual is already encouraging those things in us, and therefore it is God's plan for us to live that way.

So again we have expanded our thinking. past getting out of debt to encompass healthy living. and realizing that healthy living to us was is having no debt, treating our bodies as temples, and having a relationship with God. we started seeing a "natural" doctor. one that didn't want to put my husband on medication because his cholesterol was slightly elevated, one that thinks there is a better fix for problems than swallowing a pill and moving on. just like how we learned to see paying for something with a credit card is not a solution. it's just a big band-aid.

so here we are now, a few weeks into our new nutrition lifestyle which our doctor calls "12 weeks to wellness". we are in the first phase of the process which helps to get all the toxins out of our bodies that we have been accumulating for years with medicine and heavily processed foods. Our food options are a little limited right now, but it is forcing us to think about what we are putting in our bodies. we'd like to use this blog to talk about our journey to a less cluttered life. we want to share articles we love, the food we're eating, tips, observations, frustrations, decisions and anything else we may encounter along the way.