A lot of books pass through my hands every year. And the ones that impress me are rarer than chicken molars.
However, Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most by Mark and Lisa Scandrette took me by surprise.
This is an excellent piece of writing. And it impressed me.
Free is not your typical book. It’s like a workbook for your life. An assessment test. A life plan. A practical manual for reviewing the major aspects of your life and reassessing them.
There are two things that are perhaps the best gauges of your heart and what you really believe: Your wallet and your calendar.
How you spend your time and your money speaks volumes about you and your character. And that’s precisely where Free focuses its laser beam.
The book is written in a casual style. Yet it’s not too casual. And the way the chapters are divided makes it easy to digest.
If you’ve never created a life plan, you should. Soon. And this is the book that you would begin with.
The chapters contain great insights, stories, practical assessments, tests, and questions so that you could easily navigate the major parts of your life and evaluate them.
The stories are helpful also. The authors provide great ideas to incorporate. And those ideas come straight from their own experiences.
Impressively, Mark and his wife live debt-free in one of the most expensive cities in the world. So they aren’t arm-chair philosophers.
Some of the chapters deal with the following:
* discovering what matters to you most
* how to value and align your time
* how to practice gratitude and trust
* how to create a spending plan
* how to maximize your resources
* how to live generously and spend wisely
Again, this is a superb book that every Christian should own and use.
If you’re married, I’d encourage you to go through it with your spouse. Take a few pages a night and discuss them.
And if you’re single, I’d also encourage you to do it by yourself.
The good folks at Patheos asked me to talk about one of the chapters in light of my own passion.
Since I have a heart for the poor and helping those in need, the chapter on living generously gave me further fodder to explore more creative ways of doing this. (Click here to see the 4 ways I’ve been helping the poor this year. I have been on the look-out for other ideas, so I’m thankful for this chapter.)
The chapter also provides some great insight on how to view and use wealth.
Money is a big issue for everyone. Jesus talked about it a lot more than most Christian realize.
If you’re hesitant, take a look at this kewl pic of Mark, the author.
And compare with . . .
You gotta get the book now, eh? 🙂
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