7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

by Jen Hatmaker

  I found out so much about these seven countries. I was spouting facts left and right at people. When someone asked why, I talked about the countries and how little the people eat every day. I have never visited a single one of them, yet I love them all. And I yearn for the day when I can travel to each one and experience them firsthand.

  So how did a girl like me, one that eats and eats, manage during these four weeks? Prayer. When I felt hunger, I prayed. I prayed for the country, for the people, for their leaders, for the children. I prayed more during those days than I ever have. I had a physical reminder to pray. I felt no hunger after praying for a child in Haiti that would be going the entire day on a cup of rice or less. I was amazed by what God showed me during those weeks.

  7 was my introduction to fasting. After those weeks of rice and prayer, I knew I could do it again. And I have. (I recently finished a twenty-day fast from one of my favorite things.) Yes, I am embracing my eccentricity. When I take away what I enjoy, what I feel like I need, and replace it with prayer, I have felt that clarity.

  Fasting: it’s not just for Gandhi!

  Day 31

  It’s the last day of Month One, and I have some conclusions. The ordering of the seven months was fairly random; food received Slot 1 because I copied this concept from Susana, and that’s what she did. Rest got the seventh slot because God rested on the seventh day, and that seemed poetic. Other than that, the months were listed in brainstorm order.

  That said, I’m grateful food launched me out of the starting blocks. There was no shirking possible, no viable semi-attention. Seven foods required my concentration from morning until night every day. Each meal was intentional, each bite calculated. There was no escape from 7; I never had longer than five hours between meals to mentally slip away. The concept of reduction was never further than my next meal.

  This held me fast to the heart of Jesus.

  Just as a forty-day fast inaugurated His public ministry, this month has paved the way. It’s gently erased parts of the palette. I don’t know nearly as much as I think I do. My riches aren’t genuine. My story includes some fraud. Certain elements don’t belong on the canvas. I don’t know what this means yet, but the counterfeit parts must be whitewashed before they can be redrawn.

  In Simplicity, Richard Rohr wrote,

  On the way to contemplation we do the same thing that Jesus Christ did in the wilderness. Jesus teaches us not to say, “Lord, Lord,” but to do the will of his Father. What must primarily concern us is that we do what Jesus has bidden us do. Jesus went into the wilderness, ate nothing for forty days, and made himself empty. . . . Of course, emptiness in and of itself isn’t enough. The point of emptiness is to get ourselves out of the way so that Christ can fill us up. As soon as we’re empty, there’s a place for Christ, because only then are we in any sense ready to recognize and accept Christ as the totally other, who is not me.15

  Honestly, I’ve said a lot of “Lord, Lord” without simply doing the will of my Father. My mission is clouded by a thousand elements with no eternal value. The canvas is muddy. I know the correct Christian rhetoric—emptiness, surrender, humility—but those words are meaningless until they are more than words. While my life is marked by ambition, accumulation, and perceived success, then no matter how much I squawk about Jesus, I’m a resounding gong, a clanging symbol; I am nothing.

  After Jesus’ fast, He began healing, rescuing, redeeming. The Spirit filled up the emptiness Jesus created, launching Him into ministry. In some supernatural way the abstinence from food was the catalyst for Jesus’ unveiling; the real fireworks were next. Never again would Jesus fly under the radar. His powerful ministry was activated, inviting worship and opposition, salvation and death. After thirty years on earth, His story truly began.

  “He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.” (Luke 4:2)

  I am hungry.

  Month Two: Clothes

  This morning my seven-year-old Caleb went to school in “matching clothes”: a green camouflage T-shirt, brown camouflage cargo shorts, and a gray camouflage hoodie. Back in the day I would’ve marched him upstairs to change into some Gymboree collection. But now? Three real kids later? I’ve over it. This is not the hill I’m going to die on when I have bigger fish to fry, like raising them to leave my house one day and not move back.

  Frankly, I’ve always taken my son to Target in his Batman costume and let my daughter wear a leotard and boots to church. It was never worth the drama; plus, there would always be another mom pushing a little Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle around.

  On any given day I wear jeans and a T-shirt. My style is utterly unsophisticated; I look like a college girl who rolled out of bed five minutes before class—but who has prematurely aged. Anyhow, I’m a simple or possibly lazy dresser who doesn’t spend much time thinking about my wardrobe.

  Clothes are just not a huge deal to me.

  So, why clothes then? Why reduce radically in a neutral category I say I don’t care about? Because although that sounds true in my head, my closet tells me a different story. I walked through all five of our closets, and I realized we spent real cash on every single item. I did some fuzzy averaging, and if we spent around $10 on each item, our closets represent an expenditure of, well, a lot of money. (I’m a writer not an accountant.) It is such a high total I had to sit down. Especially considering we don’t wear half of the items.

  I counted, and I have 327 items from which to choose. You read that right. No other category even comes close to this one in quantity. And let’s be honest, most of these didn’t average $10. If I spent $20 on each item, that’s $6,540 spent on just my clothes in about the last five years. If the average is closer to $30, that means I’ve spent $9,810. This doesn’t include anyone else in the family.

  Sadly, I only wear a tiny percentage of these clothes. So while my mouth is yammering about my laissez faire attitude toward my wardrobe, my hand keeps reaching into my wallet to buy more. If I am serious about addressing overindulgence and irresponsible spending, I need not look any further than our closets. I spend more just on clothes in one year than the average Ethiopian family earns in almost five.

  So we are starting Month Two: seven articles of clothes. Besides the obvious crazy factor, the main wrench in the machine is speaking engagements. I have three this month. I live two separate fashion lives: my daily, one-notch-above-a-vagrant wardrobe, and my weekend, speaker-on-a-stage collection. These two styles are so opposite I’ve lost sleep trying to choose seven items that will work for both.

  Advising me this month, The Council is divided between the permissive girls and the Catholic-nun-slap-your-hand-with-a-ruler girls. Half think this month should be duplicable should any brave reader want to try it. The other half just wants me to suffer (this is my assessment). So we’ve compromised on a couple of items:

  Shoes will count as one item. However, I will only rotate through two pairs of shoes: my cowboy boots and my tennis shoes. Every working woman has two fashion lives, so two pairs of shoes is not an indulgence on par with 327 items of clothes. This still leaves twenty-one pairs untouched, lined up on shelves in my closet like I am Imelda Marcos.

  Underwear doesn’t count. It just doesn’t, okay? Between bra, panties, and socks, I’d use up half my allotment before I got my pants on. I considered omitting understuff from my wardrobe, but unleashing my free-swinging lady self onto this innocent world is probably a felony. No one deserves that kind of visual assault. So undergarments get a free pass, and if that makes me a 7 slacker, well, at least I’m a slacker wearing a bra.

  Here are my clothes for the month:

  • One pair of jeans, dark wash, kind of plain

  • One long-sleeved solid black T-shirt, fitted

  • One short-sleeved black “Haiti relief” T-shirt with white print

  • One short-sleeved gray “Mellow Johnny
’s Bike Shop” T-shirt with yellow print

  • One pair of gray drawstring knit Capri pants

  • One long silk dark brown dress shirt

  • Shoes: cowboy boots and tennis shoes

  At one point I was going to designate a scarf as one item, but Council Member Molly told me she was losing sleep over the scarf; that it wasn’t substantial enough. So I replaced it with a second T-shirt, which was probably a good move so I don’t wear my Haiti shirt for thirty straight days. In case you don’t fully understand some of the core items I’m leaving out of life for the next month, here are a few pieces that are being left in the closet:

  • No coat (it’s February)

  • No jewelry, except my $45 wedding band from Walmart

  • No accessories

  • No belts

  The Council is doing a few variations of this month along with me. Jenny and Shonna are also sticking to seven clothing items, but they are adding seven accessories, each from a different country. Every day, they’ll pray for the country that produced the hat, scarf, earrings, necklace, or bracelet they are wearing. Molly and Trina are putting each item they don in a separate part of their closets to determine what percentage they actually wear, suspecting their closets are full of clothes that cost real cash but never even get worn. Susana is wearing only handmade clothes for seven straight days. Incidentally, the fact that I have a friend with enough handmade clothes to last her a week is hysterical since my children have to bring pants to my mother-in-law to sew on missing buttons.

  Month Two begins with this wee pile of clothes. I’ll turn a blind eye to the four bars, six shelves, and one dresser full of other garments and make my peace with these seven items which I just realized are all black, gray, and brown. I’ll look like a member of the Addams family or a mime. Maybe I’ll just tell people I’m having a mid-thirties crisis and going emo. If I start wearing black nail polish and wallowing in an imaginary quagmire of torment, someone intervene.

  Day 1

  I already broke the rules. I didn’t mean to. It was less than sixty seconds. We were getting an assessment on our backyard for a garden (much more on this later in the month of our foray into green living), and it was 8:30 in the morning. It was cold and I hadn’t had any coffee. I’d obediently dressed in my Haiti tee and jeans, so all started well.

  But when gardener/activist Steven showed up to measure our yard and take soil samples, all I could see were the piles of dog poop my kids did not scoop. We appeared to be savages who couldn’t be bothered to clean giant piles of feces from their living space. He acted like he didn’t notice, but he drove himself here so he clearly wasn’t blind. And I’m pretty sure his nose worked. As if on cue, my dog Lady walked right where he was digging and took a giant dump. I whisked the poop away, professing disdain, which sounded rather empty with the fourteen other mounds of excrement existing happily in our yard.

  It was the poop’s fault. It distracted me.

  When I went inside to wash my hands, all I could think about was redeeming myself. I conjured up a story about how I’d been in Zimbabwe feeding orphans and just returned and found my family let everything run amok. I would reclaim our normally immaculate house, of course, but I just hadn’t had a chance yet. All I’d had time for since returning from Zimbabwe was preparing my typical vegetable frittata with freshly squeezed orange juice for my family’s nourishment because I care about their health and stuff. That’s how I am, Steven.

  While inventing a detail about eco-friendly cleaning supplies, I snagged a jacket before rejoining him in the backyard. I slipped it on, tra la la. As Steven was talking about afternoon sun exposure, I realized I was wearing a non-7-sanctioned item. And it was 8:30 a.m. on Day 1. I’d managed a whole two hours of obedience. Strike up the band.

  I ripped it off and threw it on the trampoline, and Steven looked up with what I recognized as alarm. Like maybe the skittish dog-poop lady lured him here to bury him in the backyard. I stammered through a quick explanation of 7, which did nothing to increase my normal quotient. I came across as an eccentric narcissist who lives in doo-doo and lies about global relief work. And by “came across as,” I mean that I am.

  So Month Two is off to a smashing success.

  Day 2

  “Make a coat one of your seven things.”

  “Aren’t you going to have a coat?”

  “Why didn’t you include a coat on your list?”

  “What about a coat or at least a jacket?”

  “No coat?”

  Yeah, I’ve been hearing this comment for the last two weeks. Maybe because this is February and my friends care about my discomfort. Or maybe these people are just extraordinarily bossy. Here’s the deal: I’m not a coat wearer anyway (despite my jacket failure yesterday). I don’t like to keep up with it. I’d rather be semicold from my car to the door of wherever I’m going.

  Plus, I live in Austin. “Winter” is a loose term here. I habitually brag to my northern friends about our mild weather, and I’m certain to post pictures of us in T-shirts on Christmas morning. Winter in central Texas kisses and makes up with us for the brutal summer punishment it inflicts. Yesterday, yes, in February, my son wore shorts to school.

  Today, however, it snowed all day.

  In the last ten years, it has snowed a total of six days in Austin. The last recorded “snow accumulation” was one-tenth of an inch in 2007. This means that when there is a snow dusting, our schools close down, panicked Texans clear the stores, and some poor soul will wreck his car. The overreaction is apocalyptic.

  My kids think a zip-up sweatshirt is a coat. They don’t know about frozen snow toes. No one has gloves. They’ve never wiped out on an icy driveway. Snowmen are just something lucky children in books get to build. Their greatest seasonal hardship is packing away flip-flops for a couple of months, though that’s a risky action since we often hit 70 degrees in the dead of winter.

  So yesterday when our weathermen predicted snow, we rolled our eyes. We know better. We’ve been their snow pawns many times before. We know they are hogging airtime with their “extreme weather warnings” only to crush our little hearts with rain.

  But low and behold, the thermometer hovered at 32 degrees, and it snowed for five straight hours in Austin, Texas, today. It barely stuck since it was 54 degrees yesterday and the ground is basically an oven, but still. My second grader’s teacher took the kids out to catch snowflakes on their tongues. My daughter put seven snowballs in our freezer. My middle schooler put on shorts and jumped on the trampoline barefoot with his buddies to see who could last the longest. (Sixth-grade boys. I’ll say no more.)

  And I was seriously cold. I put my long-sleeved T-shirt under my short-sleeved T-shirt and shivered. Jenny, the most lenient member of The Council, sent this text: “I think Jen gets a green light on a jacket and gloves so she can play in the snow with her kids. Council?”

  I declined and instead put my arms through my Capri pants for reinforcement. I slipped my other T-shirt over my head with my face peeking through the neck hole. I looked like a nun with pants on my arms. With that, I headed outside where my kids politely asked me to go back in before anyone saw me.

  As always, when the weather is frigid, I think of our friends in the homeless community: Shoeshine, Red, Bridgette, Mike, David, so many others. I was outside in inadequate clothes for less than ten minutes, and I was chilled to the bone. It took me an hour to warm up and I had a roaring fire and 72-degree home. Our church has supplied the homeless with coats and gloves and scarves for two months, but that’s putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. No outerwear can protect against sleet and punishing wind for long. Austin has between thirty-eight and forty-five hundred homeless people, but only 803 shelter beds are regularly available. Additional beds are offered when the temperature drops below freezing and a few downtown churches open for emergency shelter, but thous
ands are still out in the cold.

  More than one hundred people perished on the Austin streets last year; they died alone huddled in doorways and alleys. With one bed available for every five who need it, death by exposure is a certainty. For them, extreme weather goes far beyond inconvenience or thrill; it is perilous.

  I’ll never truly identify with those who lack sufficient clothing and shelter. 7 is temporary; I have 320 clothing items awaiting my return. When I got too cold today, I retreated inside the home I own. Problem solved.

  I’m going to bed tonight grateful for warmth, an advantage so expected it barely registers. May my privileges continue to drive me downward to my brothers and sisters without. Greater yet, I’m tired of calling the suffering “brothers and sisters” when I’d never allow my biological siblings to suffer likewise. That’s just hypocrisy veiled in altruism. I won’t defile my blessings by imagining that I deserve them. Until every human receives the dignity I casually enjoy, I pray my heart aches with tension and my belly rumbles for injustice.

  “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’

  But the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”

  —Martin Luther King Jr.

  This is the snow that fell on the second day of Month Two. Of course it did.

  Day 5

  I think it’s worth mentioning that I’m developing a rather uncouth habit. Additionally, this habit confirms that I’m a lazy dresser who doesn’t place nearly enough priority on decorum as is fitting for a thirty-five-year-old.

  As you know, I have two pairs of shoes at my disposal—cowboy boots and tennis shoes. Both require two feats of Herculean effort: putting on socks and pulling on or tying shoes. Evidently I can’t be bothered with this sort of exertion.