Stewardship

What is stewardship? Webster defines a steward as a person who manages another’s property or finances. For a Christian stewardship is accountable to God. Are you a good steward of what God has given you? How do you spend your time, money and talents? Do you use your time wisely or is it wasted playing Free Cell on the computer? Where do you spend your money—helping others or getting more stuff for yourself? What about those talents and gifts God has so graciously given each of us do you share them with others for His glory? These are some very hard questions I ask myself. And I don’t like the answers to most. My goal is to simplify my life and be a good steward of all God has given me. I plan to blog about the changes I am making and hope you will join me in this endeavor.

One area that I have been working on for a few months now is living waste free as in less trash. Here are so things that have allowed our family to take the trash out less.

• Reusable shopping bags
• Recycling everything, not just cans and paper. Check with you city or county and see exactly what you can and cannot recycling.  
• Paperless billing: I am still working on this one. I had all bills paperless expect one and then I started getting the paper copy again. 
• Reusing instead of buy more: gift wrapping, bags and tissue, cleaned out food containers for food storage, kid’s art project and games, etc
• No more paper: cloth napkins, rags instead of paper towels for clean up, real dishes –no paper plates. We do get the Sunday paper, but I reuse it for cleaning glass and windows and then recycle it.
• We get tones of junk mail so I use it to print on the back side for things like coupons. I just signed up online to opt-out of junk mail. You can go to these sites http://www.dmachoice.org/. http://www.optoutprescreen.com/  http://www.catalogchoice.org/  Not sure how well it works since I just signed up.
• No more sonic every week. This one has been easier than I thought. There was a time where we went to sonic at least once a week if not more for a cherry limeade or slush. One day it hit me how wasteful we were being—trash, gas, money, time. We now make our own special drinks and the boys choose each month were to donate this money we have saved. 
• Now for the biggie. I make homemade products and food from scratch. This has cut our trash the most. I will share recipes in the future.
•  Compost—fun and surprisingly easy more to come on this one as well.