This is the fifth post in the blog series One Year Without.  See all of the posts here. On the last post in this series I focused on which items were the hardest to give up during our year of living with less.  Now I’m going one step further and listing the items that we purchased during that year because we felt like we could not go without them.  While some items represent momentary failures in our attempts at self-control and […]

“Yeah, the fool bought himself a big ol’ king size bed that don’t even fit in his bedroom.” My ears were drawn like a magnet to the English language.  I listened to the group walking being me as they spoke loudly with strong southern drawls.  There were Americans in Schweinfurt – I had inadvertently found some of my people! I wanted to turn around and ask, “Where are y’all from?” but I hesitated, thinking maybe I’d come across too strong […]

This is the third post in the blog series One Year Without.  See all of the posts here. Over the past few years we’ve been slowly sliding downhill, shifting further away from friends and family, until we finally hit bottom when we moved abroad.   At least, that is what it felt like. Mr. Meena and I both spent several years in our college town surrounded by a church community and friends who felt like family, and we greatly missed that support system […]