We’ve just published a new resource, fresh from prayer on Friday. It’s a creative idea to help you prayerfully examine your shopping with God in order to facilitate space for heart-led changes you could make to your consumer choices as part of expressing your love for God and others. We’ve found it really helpful, and sure you will do too…
We developed this resource for a morning prayer session last week, because we wanted to give everyone in our praying community the opportunity to just sit with God and prayerfully consider their shopping with him.
It’s Fairtrade Fortnight and as well as praying about trade, joining in with campaign actions and raising awareness about resources we’ve already created around economic justice, fair-trade, trade justice and global poverty (see our topical resources page to browse these) we have also been engaged in quite a large-scale public act of witness around Fairtrade and the worth of each individual created in God’s image.
Because of this, it’s felt even more important than ever to ensure each of us is re-visiting our own lifestyle and purchasing decisions too, and re-dedicating our choices to God. So we designed this resource to use ourselves – and to share with you – to help us think about being even more prayerfully engaged and accountable around our purchasing choices.
Although we completed this resource in a group session, and shared some of our reflections together afterwards, we each worked through it individually and privately with God; and we’d encourage you to do the same.
It’s an act of worship, of surrender… an important part of our devotion, especially in a culture so consumed with consuming… and so globally interconnected.
There is plenty of information out there to tell you all the different things you could and should do to be a more ethical consumer – we are hugely thankful for, and reliant, on it (and we’ve included some links to it at the end of the resource).
There are also an increasing number of Bible study resources looking at justice issues and money – these are brilliant.
But this resource aims to be neither; it is not meant to primarily inform or instruct so much as to simply provide a framework to create space for you to sit at God’s feet and listen.
Our prayer is that it will be the Spirit that prompts you about anything you might want to explore doing differently as you shop in order to love God – and each one in seven billion he so loves – even more.
So rather than providing a list of all the things you might want to do differently, this creative prayer resource helps you simply start with where you are at, honestly and naturally, and gives an opportunity for you to see how God might be leading you forward step by step as he convicts your heart of changes you can make together.
Go on, say yes to the invitation to explore your shopping with God… you won’t be sorry you let him into this area of your life…