New Series: Subtract

Hey Everybody! One quick announcement before we dive into the new series announcement. Hope you enjoyed our last series, Truth.  If you are signed up for ACCESS updates, this will be the last week to read the posts for the Truth series on ACCESS.  With that out of the way, check out the announcement below.

As the title above suggests, we are going to talk about how to find greater balance in our lives through sacrificing.  However, what isn't told in the title is what we'll be sacrificing.  In our LYL series, we talked about giving up our personal desires to take on the desires of God.  In this series, we are going to go through a few more detailed areas to help pull us further away from world and closer to God and His plan for us. So what are these area?  The list of five are below:

Physical Possessions:  The amount of stuff we own and the pursuit of it is weighing us down.  In this section, we'll examine how giving up unnecessary things will go a long way to helping us declutter our lives and thus allow for more of God in it. 

Entertainment:  It's always been a distraction, but the modern world is idled by the amount of entertainment we have at our fingertips.  We'll examine how we can limit the amount of entertainment and what we can replace that time with.

Extra Curricular Activities/Hobbies:  These are things that can take up our time and pull us away from God's purpose as well.  We'll see how to remove wasteful activities and alter others so as to integrate God into them. 

Success/Status:  The pursuit of success and status has bee the downfall of many's Spirit walk.  We'll look at how to alter or outright cut off our pursuits of worldly success so we can start succeeding in Christ. 

Non Spiritual Social Connections:  The less we talk about God in our interactions with other, the worse off our relationships become.  We look at how to get the non essential talk down and the conversation about the things that matter up. 

More than Just Removal
You'll notice that in all five of these areas, we are looking at doing more than eliminating things.  To cut stuff out may get rid of the bad.   However, we must also replace it with the good.  This series will aim at adding to our lives as we subtract that which has been holding us back.  The series will start next Monday with Physical Possessions.  The series will be formatted as such:

Monday: Devotion including a story from the Bible, modern application and personal story from our editor in chief.

Wednesday: ACCESS page will have a special video up showcasing how this subtraction can be done.

Friday: A Podcast episode detailing our EIC's struggles with the topic and what he did and is doing to overcome them.

We hope this multimedia approach helps everyone to get the most out of this series.  We can't wait to start it and hope to hear from you about the series in advance of it's launch.  Please let us know your thoughts in the comments or on Facebook.  Thanks again and God bless and keep searching.

As a final note, we aren't saying that any of the five areas we are covering are bad.  We are simply saying that they are in need of examination and calibration in our lives.  We hope to shed some light on these areas and help others get the most out of them in their lives.