By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

A few weeks ago my nine-year old son tripped and fell at school, cutting a hole in his favorite pair of russet red cargo pants – a pair I had just recently purchased for him. He also scraped his knee, but he was more upset about his pants. Consoling him, I told him I would buy him another pair.

Later that evening I continued reading Haley Stewart’s new book, which I was reading: The Grace of Enough: Pursuing Less and Living More in a Throwaway Culture. I received a review copy from Ave Maria Press, and I was reading it alongside The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids (I often read two books at a time – one hard copy, and one on my e-reader). I heard about Stewart’s book from the podcast she does with Christy Isinger, Fountains of Carrots.

In The Grace of Enough, Stewart talks about how she and her family learned how to have more by living with less. They lived a typical suburban life; Haley stayed home with their young children while her husband, Daniel, worked a job that kept him away from home during all daylight hours. Despite trying different ways to change things around so that Daniel could be with the family more often, they decided upon a more radical change. They sold their house in Florida and moved to a sustainable farm in Texas to do a one year internship. Paring down their lives to the bare essentials so they could fit everything into a small flat with one bathroom that had a compost toilet, they spent one year enjoying life in a different way than what seemed normal and expected. After that year, Haley wrote her book describing some of the lessons she learned and how they still implement them in their return to suburban life with a radically different perspective.

One of the first lessons she learns is how to break away from the consumerist culture we live in. And my immediate response to my son about his pants just shows how consumerism has infiltrated almost every aspect of what we do. The ease and freedom of being able to dispose of something and replace it (all you need is a credit card linked to an online store) comes at a cost. “Your stuff,” Stewart writes, “is taking away your time, energy and attention.” Worse, according to Levine, consumerism can lead to some major mental health issues for adolescents. “It is a short hop from thinking that external “stuff” will alleviate emotional distress to thinking that drugs or sex will do the same thing.” But Stewart offers hope: “While the false freedom of consumerism can never make us free, we do have a chance at authentic freedom. We don’t have to live lives of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Knowing that consumerism can never fulfill us, we have a chance and a capacity to seek something else.”

That “something else” is God, family, connection, and community. In my favorite section about building our broken communities, Stewart writes:

“The drumbeat of the throwaway culture tells us not to be tied down to anything but our own individual pursuits. Yet the longing to know and be known never quite leaves us—it’s something that can be satisfied only within community.”

The temptation to be consumed by our “individual pursuits”—our jobs, our packed schedules, our side hustles—can prevent us from investing in people and in relationships, both the ones in our homes with our families and the ones outside of our homes in the community. The “throwaway culture” sees our time as money and people as expendable, but our newfound knowledge would lead us to richer relationships rather than deeper pockets and no friends.

Haley tells her story with vulnerability and honesty: it wasn’t all gardens and roses. Paring down their belongings was itself a huge challenge, and taking the risk to move and sell their house in time for the start of the internship was trying. I connected with Stewart right away when she wrote about asking St. Joseph to pray for them during this transition for their family—I once prayed a similar prayer for my family at a similar time of transition, and it was answered (I’ll save that story for another post). Their young children tracked the sawdust that they used to “flush” their toilets all over the house. But the experience helped them connect the problems with our very consumerist culture to the problems they were facing at home, and to solutions that can help lead us to a life of love, community, and grace.

Later in the evening, I considered my son’s pants. The rip was not that big and could probably be sewn back if we could find the right thread. I took a look at the pants and told my son, “I think we can repair these pants. They won’t be like new, but you will still be able to wear them.” I thought about my difficulties sewing due to my carpal tunnel syndrome. “Actually, I’ll show you how to do it,” I told him, “and then you can sew it together.” He agreed. In that small action, I taught him a skill for life – he can repair his own clothes. Despite being able to buy him a new pair of pants, doing so taught him that we didn’t need to throw away things easily, that when possible, we can repair things. And if time is money, I certainly knew I could make more money with the time it would take to teach him, and that buying him a new pair would certainly be cheaper. But I could consider the time I spent teaching him to sew not in terms of money but in terms of our relationship. And the money I would have spent on another pair can be used for something more meaningful, or given to someone who needs it.

The Grace of Enough is a book for everyone who wants to live more with less that is not just about minimalism and frugality, but about embracing the abundance God has for us when we resist the allure of a throwaway culture. Subscribe to my email newsletter and comment below about how you plan to resist consumerism and embrace community for the rest of 2018 to be entered to win one giveaway copy of The Grace of Enough (USA and Canada addresses only please). The giveaway closes on 11/9/2018 at 11:59 pm EST.

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