Living Today

How often do we fly through our day, making our way through the to-do list and rushing to get the kids to the next event they have committed to?  We talk about wanting time, but how often do we intentionally make time to let life happen rather than allowing things to dictate our actions?

I know you're already thinking, if you only knew my life.  It's a season of busy.  While I understand that seasons of busy happen, I am also learning that those seasons last much longer than they should when we continue to just let life happen to us.  

Do you know what I notice when I browse the "Christian" book section in any given book store?  The current popular books for women all have a theme.  They are instruction books on "Breaking Busy", giving "The Best Yes" and overall how to incorporate rest into our lives.  Why is it so hard as women to actually limit what we do?  Why do we need our children to be involved in multiple extra curricular activities simultaneously?  

As mother's we often talk about impact in our children's lives, but do we ever stop to question the lessons we are teaching when we over book our own schedules beyond what we can humanly sustain?

Last year for the first time I created a mission statement for life over the next five years.  Where do I want to be?  What do I want life to look like?  How do I make that picture happen?  

My reality?  I have been hearing God tell me over the last couple of years that he wants our family to live more intentionally.  I have heard and tried to incorporate different things into our lives that will move us that direction, but the reality is that most of those things have managed to fall into place prior to last year without planning.  It has kind of been dumb luck that we have managed to embrace parts of intentional living.  

Last year, thanks to author and blogger Ruth Sokup,  Living Well Spending Less, I discovered the concept of setting goals and breaking down life into smaller chunks of time.  While as with most things when you first try them, there are parts I was not completely successful on completing in her suggested list of ways to accomplish goal setting, what I did find is that I met all 5 goals for the year by December 31, 2015!  It's an amazing feeling when you can look over the year and see what you accomplished despite the varying challenges that we face over the course of a year.  

So I met with success in goal setting last year.  Setting goals should have been something I focused on prior to January 1, 2016, right?  Nope, I was sooooo busy.  There was always something else begging for attention so I spent the month of January operating in survival mode always putting off what I needed to do for what was in front of me demanding my attention.

This weekend as January came to an end, I took some time to pull out that 2016 goal setting workbook and filled out those little spaces that made me focus on what the rest of 2016 needs to look like.  Do you know what I realized?  When I take the time to calm myself, separate from the chaos and put some effort into planning, the life of our family begins to settle down.  Rather than letting life happen to us, we begin to intentional decide what happens.  

As a result of my taking the time to decide what needs to happen this year to move our family toward that goal I set for 5 years from now, we are moving forward with purpose.  Once I put down on paper that I wanted to get our kitchen remodel done by a certain date, I began to realize if we break it down into small manageable projects, it moves toward a reality rather than just being something we "want" to do (and not even a week later 90% of the wallpaper that covered our kitchen floor to ceiling is down).

When I live today in survival mode, it effects my entire family.  When I live today intentionally, with a plan, well, then the reality is our family has more time than we imagined possible.  That wallpaper that came down in the kitchen since I set some goals, that has happened while my husband and I still take time to play crazy with our little girl nearly every night and manage the other household tasks along with school for me and work for him.  Oh, and did I mention that we both are volunteer staff members at our church?

Life has moments it gets overwhelming.  Whether we live in the overwhelming moments or pass through them is entirely up to us.  If you have never tried goal setting before I encourage you to try it!  It gives you a purpose, something you are moving toward.  Set dates on those goals for the year.  You'll find some of them you accomplish way before their due date and others need to flex to later dates in the year because life happens, but being able to look at where you have been at the end of the year is an amazing feeling.

Don't know where to start?  Check out Living Well, Spending Less for a great starting point.  She has a free Goal Setting Workbook via email that she offers when you sign up for her email.  She has lots of other amazing resources on her site that she has made available as well.  

When we live life running from commitment to commitment we are never giving the best part of ourselves to anything, including our families.  When we chose to actually begin to be selective at what we say yes to, well then we are able to give the best of ourselves to multiple things, most of all our families.  We give ourselves the ability to live in today rather than being overwhelmed by tomorrow and the things left to do from yesterday.

Choose to live in the today, this moment, with the people you are with right now.  Choose to stop the crazy cycle of letting life happen to you and create intentional moments and memories today.

#nospendOctober

Earlier this year I purchased a book titled Living Well, Spending Less by Ruth Soukup.  Can I share that I loved this book and jumped on board implementing most of the ideas.  Except that crazy idea of a no spend month.  That was the one thing I was certain, I did not have the strength or will-power to do.

Fast forward 9 months later and I find our family nearly one week in to a no spend October.  I think the number of people I've had tell me they could never do that made me reflect and realize.... That was me back in January and February as I was reading this idea for the first time.  I had a long list of all of the reasons that it didn't make sense for us.  We had baby.  We "needed" to have the ability to eat out.  We needed date nights.  My list of rationalizations went on and on.

And then something happened....  God turned our life upside down.  In January, I could rationalize the need to meet people for a meal out.  The need to invest in relationships that made it impossible to give up the dining out budget.  Going to a church service took everything I had so what else were we to do, but go grab lunch out afterward?

The interesting thing about inviting God into your everyday life, something that our family has tried to do more consciously this year, is that God starts to show you what is really a value and what is just taking up space in your life.  As God moves more fully in to the life you invite Him to share, He starts to push out the things that are taking up space that He intends for something else.  

What I've discovered in my journey from "Just Say No (to this crazy idea)" January to "No Spend" October, is that when I let Him in more fully God starts to push out the unnecessary.  In some cases it's relationships that while they aren't "bad", they aren't pushing me to find ways to draw closer to Him.  In other instances it was busywork that I had allowed to consume my life over the past few years because it was "for a good cause".

The crazy thing is that our No Spend October is becoming our busiest month this fall.  We are finding opportunities to practice hospitality that we missed in the busyness of our "full" life.  We have the opportunity to take part in a Family Day at a local orchard with our daughter's daycare (ok, so I reached a little bit and justified that as a grocery expense since we're getting a bag of apples out of it).  We get to spend time with 3 different groups of friends (and that's just what we have scheduled).  We're going to the Halloween Hike at our local park on the last day of our No Spend month.  It's crazy, but our life is being stripped down to purposeful things.  Things that I walk away from feeling like I've received an amazing blessing by God in being able to just stop the craziness and allow God to push some of the unnecessary things out of my life.  So I have room for the life He wants to invite me into with Him.

My "Ouch" Moment

Have you ever had that moment when you come up with this amazing idea?  I mean it seems borderline genius!  And so you begin to work toward that idea and then comes the "Ouch" moment.  The moment you realize it's going to cost you something.....

I had one of those this week.  Our church has been doing a series called Moneybomb.  It's one of those series that one moment is encouraging, the next moment is challenging and in nearly every moment provides this underlying conviction about how I've used money unwisely.  

One of the things I've been learning over the past few years is to stop living in the guilt of what I haven't gotten right and to move forward into the future that holds the things I can change.  I can beat myself up over my tendency to cope with issues using retail therapy.  Or I can celebrate the fact I found an awesome counselor and am getting more out of what I spend for that therapy then a credit card bill.  I can look at where I've overspent in the past and beat myself up.  Or I can move forward finding ways to change those habits and re-channel that spending.

Which brings us to my brilliant idea of last week...  One of the books that has had a huge impact on my life this year is a book written by blogger Ruth Soukup titled, Living Well, Spending Less.  In this book, Ruth shares her own struggles with money, debt and how she's taken steps to change her habits.  In her book she briefly talks about a no spend month that her husband suggested they do while they were struggling with their own finances at one point.  I acknowledged the idea at the time, but quickly moved on rationalizing all of the reasons that it didn't work for us.  And then last Tuesday, Ruth posts to her Instagram account the news that their family in getting ready to do a no spend October.  This combined with the series at church led to a little voice inside saying.... "this might help that budget line item titled dining out".  So before I could talk myself out of it again, I texted the idea to my husband.  

That's how I find myself with a week left before we begin our no spend October.  Can I share it's kind of scary?  I have all of these "what ifs" popping up in my head.  What if the starkness of a month of no spending triggers my panic attacks?  What if I forgot to prepare for something I didn't realize we need?  Our concessions since it was rather last minute has been to keep our grocery budget as usual, but to see if we can have left over at the end of the month to roll into the savings and to keep previously made appointments with mentors and family.  I still find myself a little apprehensive though...  

I think my big "ouch" moment came in realizing I need to give up my Starbucks study sessions for four weeks.  That's a little hard.  We actually discussed whether I keep them or not, but I know our purpose is to reset our priorities.  As much as I like to think it is, Starbucks is NOT a necessity.  It's a luxury.  One of the convicting realizations that I've had over the past week is the way we have come to view our dining out as a necessity rather than a treat or a luxury.  Part of me knows we really need this reset, but another part of me fears the unknown and what comes with it.

What about you?  Does your life need a reset in an area?  Maybe a no spend October is something your budget needs, too.  Want to join us in the adventure?  Company always makes the trip more fun! 

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

Living Life Differently

I find myself wondering lately when did we buy into the idea that overextending ourselves and filling our calendars past the bursting point was acceptable?  When did we decide that if we could spend just 5 minutes in the morning letting our Father fill us that we could make it through the day?  When did we start to believe that it's normal and okay to live like our lives are a fast food restaurant doling out the minutes of our lives to all of the various work, church, charitable and family commitments that clamor for their share of fractions of seconds of our lives?

I've noticed an overwhelming amount of my friends that seem desperate for a few more hours in their day. a few more minutes to their week or even just one more second to the month, just to get everything that life is demanding from them.  I'm starting to form a theory about this pattern that I recognize creeps up even into my life after nearly a year of consciously choosing to work on changing those patterns in myself.  I fully believe that all of those "good" causes are ways the Enemy chooses to distract us from being the best possible version of ourselves we can be.  

I mean face it....  Work is something we do to sustain our families so it's not exactly something we can just decide not to do one day, but it takes a huge amount of courage to ask if the job that demands so much of our time is really the job we need at this moment of our lives.  And church and charity...  Who is going to dare say that maybe you should turn down that request to provide a meal to a family in the need or say no to the latest suggestion that maybe you should volunteer in yet another ministry that is beginning to form?  And I think it goes without saying that we can't exactly leave our children and spouses to survive on their own and expect those relationships to survive unscathed....  So how are we suppose to manage all of the things that demand our attention and drain our lives of the vital resource of time?

For myself I'm finding that it requires that I break the cycle.  It means that the word "No" has become vital to my vocabulary.  Now it doesn't always come out of my mouth that way, but learning to recognize and verbalize that something doesn't work for me right now is key to my survival in this current phase of my life.  Giving myself permission to "just say no" has been invaluable.  It's changed how much and how often I feel overwhelmed and over-extended.  

By their fruits you will know them.

Matthew 7:16a

I think about this verse and wonder what people see in my life as compared to the life of Christ?  Do I value the same things that he did?  Do I show it by the choices I make?

Out of this line of thought have come some life changes for me.  Through my search for what I value, God has brought some amazing women into my life through books, blogs, conferences and a church who's motto I've adapted and adopted as my life motto.  Let me introduce you briefly to these inspiring women and the lesson each taught me.

First into my life in the middle of some hard life changes came Bonnie Gray, a blogger (Faith Barista) and author, who introduced me to the concept of Spiritual Whitespace.  This idea of stopping my life and letting God share His truth about me was life-changing.  It meant that rather than living in the middle of anxiety and panic attacks I could begin to live in the truth that I was God's Beloved.  It didn't matter that I wasn't good enough for certain jobs or roles in other people's eyes, God had a plan and saw me as something to be cherished.

Next God built on that idea of Whitespace by introducing into my world yet another author and blogger, Ruth Soukup and her book and blog, Living Well, Spending Less.  The idea that stuff can be distracting isn't really a new concept, but Ruth shared her own story in such a way that one of the changes I've implemented into my life this year is working toward living life more intentionally and living with only the things we need.  It's a work in progress, but I find the more I say no to stuff the easier it is to say no to the things that attempt to demand my time and energy.

Following the idea of Living Well, I was introduced to Jennifer Dukes Lee, at a women's conference.  As I began to say no to those things that vied for my time and attention I've noticed that the fear of what other's think always hides in the recesses of my mind.  Who would be offended if I posted this very real thing in a blog post?  What will they think when I say no to this event?  And the list goes on.  Through Jennifer, I was given the perspective of I don't need others approval.  I've been Pre-Approved by God!  He loves me just as I am.  I'm a work in progress and that's ok.  

Three women with very different messages over the past year have helped give me some traction in how to adapt the motto from a church that has come to hold a special place in my heart over the past year and a half.  This church has the motto of Doing Church Differently, while staying true to the message of Jesus Christ.  I love it!  It permeates everything they do as a church from their services to their businesses to their community involvement.  I find myself taking the spirit of that motto into my personal life.  I want to live my life differently, while sharing the message of Jesus Christ in every choice I make.  

Living life differently for me has begun to mean, purging the stuff that hangs out in my house demanding time, attention and energy to organize and clean it.  It means carving time out for Whitespace in the middle of a world that says doing more looks productive.  It means learning to live without the approval for others.  I know their are so many more things that will continue to go into living life differently, but this seems to be the foundation of a good start.....