Generosity Testimonial 04: Josh & Abbi

Rule of Life

Practicing the Way

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 700 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2024

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Josh and Abbi learned early on in marriage to live on a meager income – just enough to cover essential needs, and not much else. Today they consider it a gift, because it taught them how little they really needed. When they did make enough for a small surplus and sensed the pull of materialism, they incorporated practices into their lives to maintain radical generosity. The result has been joy and contentment, both for themselves and for their children.

This podcast accompanies the Generosity Practice, a four-session experience designed to help integrate generosity into your community. Learn more at practicingtheway.org/generosity. Thanks to The Circle and other givers, all our resources are free. To learn more about The Circle, visit practicingtheway.org/give. To run a Practice with your church or small group, visit practicingtheway.org/resources.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Rule of Life podcast.
0:05.0	Today we're gonna hear a story of how the practice of generosity shows up in the everyday lives of real people.
0:14.0	Now Jesus commands us to be generous to the poor.
0:17.0	This week we'll hear Josh and Abby Porter's journey of living that out.
0:23.8	Hi, I'm Josh.
0:25.0	This is my wife, Abby, and we live in Vancouver, Washington.
0:28.2	We have been married for 17 years, and we have three kids.
0:35.3	We have 10-year-old Beck, 8-year-old Ila, and 2-year-old Arlo.
0:41.1	Well, I think our theology of generosity financing budget was a natural outgrowth of circumstance.
0:51.8	We had spent years operating at kind of the American
0:59.0	poverty line because of lifestyle I was a traveling musician and season of life
1:08.0	it was it was the right time to do, both really young and before we had kids.
1:12.5	And we survived on very, very little and didn't really think much about it.
1:20.2	We figured we had what we needed, and we were able to do the things that we felt were important
1:26.5	for us to do when that season of life changed
1:29.2	and when I got a different job and when we weren't as impoverished as we had been, that kind of
1:36.9	essential frugality followed us from one season to the next. And when you learn to live with
1:43.7	very, very little and you don't have any excess
1:49.3	at all, for years of our marriage, there was kind of like, there's enough to pay rent and to get
1:56.3	groceries, and then that's it, and we were quite happy. So when that is your standard and suddenly there is excess,
2:05.6	I think we were fortunate that we had already been forced by circumstance to learn what it means to live without excess.
2:15.6	And so excess truly felt like excess.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Practicing the Way, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Practicing the Way and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.