7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

By Jen Hatmaker

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with all your stuff, life, media, noise, stress, etc.?  Do you want to simplify and slow down, but don’t really know what that means or how to do it?  Are you ready for a real life-changing experiment that you will never forget?  T2W was certainly feeling that way and we recently read this book, while engaging in the “7 fast” and loved it!  (Of course we admitted earlier this fall that we aren’t half the woman Jen Hatmaker is and so we only did two weeks on each area of fasting.  Yeah whatever, we really wanted to be done before Thanksgiving, so there! J)  For more information on how we did or if you’re bored and want to read a bunch of whining, “like” and checkout our Facebook Page!  So, read on our friend!  

“American life can be excessive, to say the least. That’s what Jen Hatmaker had to admit after taking in hurricane victims who commented on the extravagance of her family’s upper middle class home. She once considered herself unmotivated by the lure of prosperity, but upon being called “rich” by an undeniably poor child, evidence to the contrary mounted, and a social experiment turned spiritual was born.

7 is the true story of how Jen (along with her husband and her children to varying degrees) took seven months, identified seven areas of excess, and made seven simple choices to fight back against the modern-day diseases of greed, materialism, and overindulgence.

Food. Clothes. Spending. Media. Possessions. Waste. Stress. They would spend thirty days on each topic, boiling it down to the number seven. Only eat seven foods, wear seven articles of clothing, and spend money in seven places. Eliminate use of seven media types, give away seven things each day for one month, adopt seven green habits, and observe “seven sacred pauses.” So, what’s the payoff from living a deeply reduced life? It’s the discovery of a greatly increased God—a call toward Christ-like simplicity and generosity that transcends social experiment to become a radically better existence.”