Freezer Food

As we continued to look at creating more financial margin in our lives this week, Pastor Steve challenged all of us to to develop a “lifestyle reduction plan.” I don’t know about you, but I’m having a hard enough time losing weight, so to think about putting my whole lifestyle on a reduction plan seems to be an insurmountable task!

However, over this past week, I started to see some simple ways that I could create more margin in my finances that would be fairly easy to put in place. Besides reexamining my budget and debts this week, I also decided to take stock of what I already have in my house. I went through my house, room by room and closet by closet. I’ve got a lot of stuff! I even went through my fridge and freezer! So, this week I decided to implement my new “Freezer Food Adventure” margin plan.

I took an inventory of all that I have in my freezer and in my pantry. There is enough food to feed me for at least a month or more! It was amazing to me – I found seven pounds of salmon and halibut from friends in Alaska, not to mention about 40 chicken breasts, along with a number of unidentifiable frozen objects. (They were a little scary!)

Just looking at those “frozen blobs” of stuff encased in ice, caused me to have flashbacks to my childhood when my parents would buy canned vegetables from “Banks” in Minneapolis that didn’t have their labels on them. You never knew what kind of vegetable you were going to have the “pleasure” of eating for dinner some nights. Banks, in case some of you don’t remember that store, was a retailer that would salvage and sell overstocks and damaged items, but they also had discounted food items.

I would suspect that, just like me, many of you also have freezers and pantries that are brimming over, too. Yet we all continue to go to the grocery store a couple times a week and buy more food because “there isn’t anything to eat at home.” While food is only one area on our budgets to examine as we do a lifestyle reduction plan, I would challenge all of us to look at those “little” ways that we can create a bit more financial margin in our lives. Little cuts can add up over time. We are called to be good stewards of all that we have been given.

Below is a video clip entitled “The God Pie” that points out how many of us look at our finances each month.


Pax,
Pastor Carol