Giving Challenge

We are learning as a family the value of setting up traditions. One tradition we just launched is if one receives a gift for his birthday he has to give something like it away to someone in need.

Our youngest celebrated her birthday and we decided to implement this. Instead of doing it for her only when she received the gift we made all the children sacrifice a toy. What my middle child did blew me away. My son and our younger daughter brought toys that they really did not care for. But my older girl brought her favorite toy out and told us to give that away to a child in need!

One of the challenges that the mainstream media and popular culture present us is how much can we accumulate, store and hoard to ourselves. It seems like the rules of the game are who has the most toys wins the game. So we figure out how to store more clothes into our closets and more things into our garages and attics.

What a novel idea my daughter has? What about giving something that we even like away whenever we receive something new? (Maybe it will eliminate our need to pay for storage for things we don't use:-)

So this post is a challenge to all of us this week to give something we like away. It will help us to understand that the thing isn't more important than the person we give it to and if nothing else it will reduce the clutter - in our homes and in our hearts.