BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Every day, social media bombards us with the most recent must-have products: a “life-changing” device, viral fashion pieces, or the hottest new beauty item. It’s easy to fall into a loop of endless buying, adding to your cart only to feel overwhelmed and unfulfilled. A no-spend month could be the solution for people wishing to break away from this cycle and regain control of their finances. Traci Williams, PsyD, a board-certified clinical psychologist and financial therapist, receives frequent inquiries from clients who are battling with overspending. “They’ve been charging things to their credit cards, carrying a balance every month, and accumulating debt,” Dr. Williams explains. Financial problems can have a negative impact on both mental and physical health, causing anxiety and sleeplessness. That’s where the no-spend challenge comes in—a straightforward, organized approach to resetting financial habits and reducing money-related stress. A no-spend month often entails refraining from non-essential spending for a defined period. You only spend money on necessities like groceries, utilities, housing, and transportation, avoiding discretionary spending like dining out, shopping, and entertainment. The criteria are flexible—each individual can establish their own guidelines—but the idea is to reduce wasteful spending so you can focus on financial goals. Here are five ways having a no-spend month could transform your life: 1. Improve your financial health It’s no surprise that spending simply on necessities can benefit your money. For Jazmine Waller, a month without spending was a game changer. “I decided I needed to do a no-spend month to stop spending money, see where it was going, and save to get ahead,” she said. After canceling superfluous subscriptions and following a strict budget, she was able to pay off $17,000 in debt in nine months. Dr. Williams notes that no-spend months are especially advantageous to people who live paycheck to paycheck. “By engaging in this practice, they become more conscientious of what they’re doing with their money. It can lead to lasting changes in their financial behavior,” she says. 2. Reduce stress and financial anxiety Money-related stress is far too prevalent. A 2023 study discovered a relationship between money anxieties and psychological distress. For Waller, the relief of paying off debt and avoiding late bills was life-changing. “Not receiving phone calls about overdue bills is a huge benefit,” she says. “I’m not running away from my phone anymore, or avoiding 1-800 numbers. It’s a great feeling.” When you actively manage your money and stick to a plan, you can feel in control, which is empowering. Waller reports that after completing her first no-spend month, she felt more confident and capable of reaching future financial goals. 3. Make the most of what you already have Elyse Lyons, a 29-year-old who does no-spend months four times a year, sees these trials as opportunities to rediscover the worth of what she currently has. “I have a bookshelf full of books, a closet full of clothes. I should be using those things before buying new ones,” she says. This shift in perspective from consuming more to appreciating what you already have might result in a more intentional and rewarding relationship with your things. Lyons has also devised innovative ways to use public resources such as libraries and community centers to take part in new experiences without paying money. She tells others that they can partake in hobbies or trends without continually purchasing new items. “No-spend months force you to take a step back and really appreciate what you already have,” she says. 4. Be creative with your free time A no-spend month challenges you to think outside the box and discover free or low-cost alternatives to your typical activities. Dr. Williams observes that breaking habits such as eating out or buying creates new opportunities. “Instead of brunch every Saturday, you may find yourself thinking, ‘What else can I do that’s cost-free?’” she explains. This transformation typically results in more meaningful experiences with loved ones. Lyons believes that it is important to find delight in small moments. “We’re more intentional about making quality time together,” she adds. Instead of going to a trampoline park or a movie theater, she may organize a fun family night at home, complete with homemade snacks and a movie. These kinds of activities not only save money but also help create lasting memories. 5. Reduce your environmental impact Aside from the financial and mental rewards, a no-spend month promotes more sustainable habits. Avoiding impulsive purchases, particularly low-quality items, helps you keep waste to a minimum. In 2018, Americans discarded nearly nine million tons of clothing, while the global fashion sector emitted more than two billion tons of greenhouse gases. Resisting the temptation to engage in fast-fashion or viral fads during a no-spend month will help you reduce your environmental impact. Lyons, who is now making more deliberate purchases, also looks for used products wherever possible. “I see things differently now. Instead of being stuck in the consumerism cycle, I enjoy my purchases more,” she explains. Tips for a successful no spend month If you’re considering starting a no-spend month, Dr. Williams recommends a balanced approach. “Avoid being too restrictive. Give yourself a little flexibility, or set a limit on how much you can spend on non-essentials,” she says. Lyons adds that it’s important to give yourself grace: “Don’t get wrapped up in perfection. If you slip up, reflect on why and learn from it.” Share your plans with friends and family to hold yourself accountable, and unsubscribe from any email lists or social media pages that may tempt you. Keeping track of your success throughout the month, such as marking a calendar for each no-spend day, will help you keep motivated and focused on your goals. A no-spend month is more than just a financial reset; it’s an opportunity to reduce stress, be creative, and live more deliberately. And at the end of the month, you may discover that the benefits go far beyond simply saving money.The post 5 ways a ‘no-spend month’ can transform your life for the better first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

We may feel like God could never forgive us, but like Abraham, we must believe God’s promise of grace.

Young men are turning back to the church. As per recent reporting from The New York Times, Gen Z men are more religious than our female counterparts. Young men are staying in churches even as young women leave them—the gender breakdown of Gen Zers disaffiliating from religion is 54 percent to 46 percent, with women in the majority. In a world where two-fifths (40 percent) of Gen Z women describe themselves as “religiously unaffiliated,” only about a third (34 percent) of Gen Z men are willing to adopt the same label. As researchers ponder this unprecedented trend, a question emerges: Ought the church to view this reversal optimistically, as a sign of abnormal spiritual renewal; or cynically, as the inevitable result of widespread institutional disparity in which young men get the short end of the stick? Young Men as Patients Augustine is often attributed as saying, “The church is not a hotel for saints but a hospital for sinners.” If this is the case, American masculinity is a population of perfect patients. Young men in America are, by many meaningful metrics, not doing well. As I’ve written elsewhere, On average, men my age are underperforming academically and taking fewer specialized courses—if they pursue higher education at all, which we’re also doing less on average. In three decades, the number of men reporting having zero close friends has jumped fivefold, while suicide rates among men 25–34 years old have risen by 34 percent. My generation’s tragic decline is, in far too many cases, quite literally a matter of life and death. Social scientist Arthur Brooks lists four building blocks for human happiness: faith, family, work, and friends. Men are struggling with at least the latter two. Add to this the decreasing prominence of social spaces curated specifically for men, and you can begin to understand why many young men perceive themselves as having been cast aside even as the culture ran to support and empower young women. Young men in America are, by many meaningful metrics, not doing well. As researcher Richard Reeves points out, “The trend has been for male organizations to become co-ed, even as female ones remain single-sex, or at least keep their specific mission to serve girls and women. . . . We’ll look back on the decision of so many organizations, especially those focused on boys and young men, to abandon a single-sex approach as a mistake.” Church as Hospital Against that backdrop, then, why are young men picking the church? It isn’t an institution with a single-sex approach—arguably, its desire to be a space for both genders has played a major role in its status as a formative institution that shapes both congregant and culture, as opposed to a performative institution shaped by culture. And yet, that’s just it—young men are staying in the church because we believe the church actually offers something more than a pro-masculine space. It offers an anthropology rooted in biblical responsibility instead of earthly identity. If, as sociologist Philip Rieff noted in the 1960s, the church is once again becoming an institution people seek out for “a rationale for their misery,” Gen Z men’s willingness to stick with religion is no surprise at all. Young men who feel cast aside by a culture where fixing female struggles means ignoring male ones will be better served by a culture where fixing earthly struggles means reorienting to a heavenly philosophy of human purpose and vocation. To the Gen Z man, the one battling loneliness or disenfranchisement or the PornHub tab that’s too easy to click on, the postmodern vision of enforced gender parity where all are one in the equal sharing of identity-based misery is far inferior to the Christian vision of human equality where all are one in Christ. Opportunity So how should the church view this surge of young, meaning-starved, community-hungry men coming through its doors? The temptation to view this as an opportunity to immediately pump them full of culture-war training points is strong. But that comes later. The church offers an anthropology rooted in biblical responsibility instead of earthly identity. Before channeling that formative energy into what the church can get young men to do for society, we need to view young men’s willingness to stick with the church as an unexpected opportunity to correct the errors the world’s philosophy has fed them, whether through the godless extremes of the manosphere or the insidious male guilt that progressivism has so widely sown to teach young men their struggles are some oppressor’s burden to be borne in silence. The church needs to view young men rediscovering the value of church the same way as anyone who comes through the doors on a Sunday—as an individual capable of profound virtue and excellence, and one whose soul can be cared for best by lifting the profoundly heavy burden of postmodernity and replacing it with the easy yoke and light burden of the only One by whom man’s chief end is ever to be achieved.

If there’s one statistic everyone knows about the Bible, it’s that it’s the best-selling book of all time. Less known is that the best-selling artist of all time is a Swiss Bible illustrator; that the earliest illustrated Bible may well come from Ethiopia; or that the country that produces the most Bibles today is China, the same country that banned many Bible apps. This is just a sample of “Bible superlatives” that reflect the Good Book’s global reach. According to Wycliffe stats, just over 50 percent of all languages have some portion of the Bible, reaching up to 98 percent of all people. For a set of books written in a small sliver of the ancient world, that’s a remarkable feat. And everywhere the Bible has gone, it has changed its readers and, in turn, been changed by them. As Bruce Gordon, professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale Divinity School, writes in The Bible: A Global History, “Every new Bible lay at the crossroads of cultures, and no translation existed without inheriting linguistic, theological, ritual, and political legacies” (55). The Good Book as a Great Book In telling how this ancient book of books has gained audiences that stretch into every corner of the globe, Gordon has done something unique. Yes, we get the usual coverage of the English Bible: Wycliffe’s controversial defense of putting the Bible in English, Tyndale’s inspiring sacrifice to give it to the plowboy, the towering achievement of the King James translators—it’s all here. But we get so much more. We get a history of Bible illumination; the Bible in the age of science; the Bible and global missions; and, notably, whole chapters on the Bible in Africa, Asia, and global Pentecostalism. This is a book that delivers on its subtitle. The Bible’s value for its many readers is reflected in a range of splendid Bibles. This includes the 6th-century Rossano Gospels whose parchment was dyed purple and inscribed with silver ink. Jerome famously decried such opulence as sinful decadence. But this didn’t stop illuminators. Another famously illustrated Bible is the gigantic Codex Gigas, a Latin Bible from the 13th century weighing nearly 170 pounds and famous for its full-page depiction of a red-horned, green-faced Devil (from which it was nicknamed the Devil’s Bible). The value of the Bible for its many readers is reflected in a range of splendid Bibles. By the time of the Renaissance, a new set of Bibles appeared whose size wasn’t measured in pounds but in columns. Known as the great polyglots, these Bibles combined the biblical text from multiple ancient languages—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and so on—side-by-side in order “to demonstrate the breadth of God’s revelation and the frontiers of human learning” (150). The cost to make one of these great polyglot Bibles is the equivalent of about $30 billion in today’s dollars, comparable to the entire budget of NASA in the 1960s. The Good Book as a Misunderstood Book Far more than a history of particular Bibles, The Bible is a history of Scripture’s readers. Though consistently evenhanded, Gordon challenges popular misconceptions. He dispels what he calls “one of the greatest mistruths perpetuated by the Protestant Reformation”: the notion that “the Bible disappeared during the Middle Ages” (108). In fact, it was everywhere. There’s a risk, however, of overcorrection. The medieval church wasn’t as unified as Gordon sometimes suggests. One only needs to read Wycliffe’s writings to see that the Bible wasn’t always a source of “a universal bond” among the medieval faithful (129). The upheaval of the Reformation sometimes masks the disunity of the time before it. When it comes to the scientific revolution, far from being eclipsed by the new empiricism, the Bible was central to thinkers like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon. “The question with which these thinkers grappled,” Gordon writes, “was not really whether the Bible was still relevant in a world in upheaval but how it was so” (179). The Bible couldn’t be so easily shelved. Even in places like the antebellum South and the European colonies in Africa, the Bible had a way of finding a welcome home among those it was used to subdue. In the South, slaves found hope in the exodus account and in the story of Jesus who was abused and brutalized but ultimately vindicated by God. In Africa, Desmond Tutu was known to say the white man came to Africa and said to the Africans, “Let us pray.” When they got up, the white man had the land and the Africans had the Bible—to which Tutu was known to occasionally add, “And we got the better deal!” (373). As a result, there are more Anglicans today in Nigeria than in the United States and United Kingdom combined. The Good Book as the Laypeople’s Book Of course, the Bible hasn’t spread on its own. It has been translated, published, and carried to new lands. Laypeople have often been at the forefront of such efforts. Two organizations that deserve more credit for this than perhaps any other are the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Gideons. The former was inspired by the story of 16-year-old Mary Jones, who walked a reported 28 miles to obtain a Bible in her native Welsh. In its first 30 years, the society printed and distributed more than 8.5 million Bibles in 157 languages. The Gideons was another lay-led and lay-run Bible organization. Founded by two Bible salesmen in 1898, it has distributed over 2.5 billion Bibles in travel locations all over the world. Everywhere people go, the Bible has gone with them. The Bible has an amazing history. Everywhere people go, the Bible has gone with them. Gordon’s The Bible is a feat of good storytelling. Despite the narrative’s huge range, it never gets bogged down by any single character, place, or idea. If there’s one consistent thread, it’s the tension between the Bible as both a universal and a particular book. It always takes shape in particular places with particular people in their particular cultures—and yet it has a way of constantly breaking those bounds in new and surprising ways. From Gordon’s sprawling, fascinating history, we conclude the Bible isn’t just a global book but a living and active one too.

“Many Christians are more curious about whether or not their dog will be in heaven than seeing the face of Jesus there.” If you can’t say amen, say ouch. That’s from my friend Cameron Cole’s new book, Heavenward: How Eternity Can Change Your Life on Earth (Crossway). Cameron is founder of Rooted, a ministry dedicated to fostering gospel-centered student ministry. True to this opening statement, he says, “To long to be in heaven is to long to be with Christ.” In his book, he aims to stoke the fires of our longing for eternity with Christ. Sometimes I’ll explain hell this way: If you don’t want to be with Christ, then you won’t want heaven. Or, if you’re too much in love with this world, or expecting too much from this world, you won’t want heaven. Or if you think you’re basically good and the world basically works well for you, you might not see the need for heaven—or at least not hell, where God judges the sins that seem to go unpunished on earth. Even so, we were made with eternity in our hearts. Cameron writes, “Our hearts were made for perfect love and perfect fellowship. Nothing short of this standard will quench the pain and yearning, and nothing close to this standard will come to us in the fallen earth.” Cameron joined me on Gospelbound to tell his heavenward story, how he envisions heaven, the biggest barriers to living the heavenward life, and more.

Much deserved

On the one hand, NBC Nightly News was the only evening network newscast to acknowledge that there were dueling protests on occasion of the first anniversary of Hamas’ barbaric Black Sabbath attack against Israel. On the other, the network both-sidesed the protests. Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on NBC Nightly News on Monday, October 7th, 2024 (click "expand" to view transcript): NBC NIGHTLY NEWS 10/7/24 7:12 PM LESTER HOLT: The (10/7) anniversary met with remembrance and rage in the U.S., with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators marking the attack and the deadly war it sparked in Gaza. Stephanie Gosk has our report. STEPHANIE GOSK: Demonstrations growing tonight on the anniversary of the October 7th attacks, fueling familiar tensions across the country, especially at Columbia University. How do you feel with this demonstration going on here on campus today? STUDENT: I feel unsafe as a Jew. We are a group of people just supporting and mourning the loss of lives taken. That's all we want to do, is to mourn. GOSK: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many with faces covered, calling for an end to the war. PROTESTER: People are dying. We're doing nothing about it. GOSK: Outside the gates, pro-Israel demonstrators waved flags and prayed for the hostages amid heightened security. First-year grad student Sara Kashani says she considered not studying at Columbia. SARA KASHANI:  It's hard, as a proud Jew and a proud Zionist, to commit to a school that doesn't value you as a person. GOSK: While for many today was a day of remembrance, recognized by President Biden with a candle lighting ceremony in The White House, nationwide, universities have been bracing for protests. At USC, and the University of Maryland. STUDENT: On this day in particular it's very difficult for the jewish community. STUDENT: This is our chance to make sure that our campus community is actually aware of what's happening in Palestine. GOSK: In the last year, schools have struggled balancing freedom of speech and safety on campus. University presidents testified on Capitol Hill. MICHAEL SCHILL: I'll be the first to admit our existing rules and policies are falling short. GOSK: The clashes at colleges reflecting growing antisemitism and Islamophobia in the country. More than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the last year. And a 69% increase in complaints about islamophobia. Tonight there are dueling protests in New York including here in Times Square. There’s a large police presence and they’ve set up barricades to prevent confrontation. Lester. HOLT: All right. Stephanie Gosk tonight, thank you. With a summer behind us, viewers are supposed to forget the anti-semitic violence and eliminationist rhetoric that emanated from these protests. Viewers are also expected to forget that these protests often descended into physical violence.  NBC, which once praised the resolve of anti-semitic protesters at Columbia, is back at it again. Per Gosk’s reporting, “pro-Palestinian protesters” simply call for an end to the war, versus a literal end to Israel itself.  The biggest tell in the report is the lumping in of the 10,000 reported anti-semitic incidents with the 69% increase in complaints about Islamophobia. What does this even mean? What goes into these actual complaints? We don’t even know. Viewers are just supposed to accept these data at face value. On the day that the world remembered the barbarism of Hamas’s October 7th pogrom, NBC chose to provide moral equivalence to those who call for the elimination of Israel. Decency compels us to say “Never Again”. Apparently, NBC feels compelled to say, “So What?”  

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