Defeating the Purpose?

Luke has some time off this weekend and we plan to go through the house and garage and weed out a lot of the things we don't need anymore. (Where did all this stuff come from?!) We've always been book buyers and very rarely purged books from our shelf. Our house rule is that we can only have as many books as fit on the shelves... so we've put in a lot of extra shelves.

Last night, we went through the bookshelves and removed at least 4 boxes of books. We're trying out half.com to sell the many textbooks we no longer need, but it didn't seem worth it to list the paperbacks. So we checked out paperbackswap.com. It's awesome! Basically, each member posts books he or she is willing to part with. Listing the first 10 books earns 2 credits. Books cost 1 credit. After listing books last night, I can go shopping from everyone else's list of books and they can shop for mine. For every book I send out to another shopper, I get an additional credit. I pay shipping to send books out and the other members pay for the shipping to send books to me. I can also get credits for referring people, so if you're interested and you click through the link at the top of this post and post 10 books, I'll get a credit.

So you can see where this is going... for every paperback book that actually leaves our house, we can get another one. Maybe this wasn't such a great idea after all...

Not For Sale

I'm reading this book called "Not For Sale" that I picked up two years ago but didn't get around to reading. I bought it after hearing the author, David Batstone, speak. In the book, he takes a look at human trafficking around the world. Without going into very graphic detail, he tells stories of several people who were recently held and traded as slaves in different parts of the world. It also talks about some of the the many organizations and individuals who are instrumental in freeing these slaves.

I haven't finished it yet, but so far I can recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more about the current state of human trafficking, the organizations committed to fighting it, and the modern abolitionist movement. And it's this month's free download at christianaudio!