21 Ways to Finding Peace

When searching for peace one of the best ways is to be direct.  21 Ways to Finding Peace and Happiness: Overcoming Anxiety, Fear, and Discontentment Every Day by Joyce Meyer provides just that.  I was surprised to find that I appreciated Joyce Meyer's ministry.  As an older white lady from the South I (erroneously) assumed that her perspective would provide a conflicting lens to my world view.  I was wrong.  Just goes to show you can never judge a book by its cover.

While I am a big fan of enumerated lists of ways to do something 21 was a lot!  So I am prioritizing.  Some of them I have already been working on:

Peacekeeper #4: Don’t Worry About the Future
Peacekeeper #8: Stop Rushing
Peacekeeper #11: Keep Your Priorities in Order
Peacekeeper #12: Protect Your Health
Peacekeeper #13: Avoid Financial Pressure
Peacekeeper #14: Keep Your Thoughts Above Life’s Storms
Peacekeeper #16: Adapt Yourself to the Needs of Others
Peacekeeper #20: Maintain a Quiet Inner Life

Others are good next steps:

Peacekeeper #5: Don’t Be Double-Minded 

"God’s way is one of being decisive. We are not to make decisions so quickly that we don’t give them proper thought and prayer. We should seek wisdom and be sure we are following peace. But once we have done all we can do to assure we are making a right decision, as far as we know, there is nothing else to do except be courageous and do something, lest we do nothing."  While I am in general a very decisive person, there is often a lot of questioning or self-doubt after the fact.  This has become increasingly true as I have been working on shedding projects and other areas that are not priorities.  Fewer priorities and increased mental space has left room for a lot of self-doubt which for sure is not the end goal.

Peacekeeper #6: Stay Supernaturally Relaxed 

"To have peace, it is very important that we abide in Christ, and this means to spend time with Him on a consistent basis. In the world we live in today, a little bit of time with God is not enough. God has to be first in our thoughts, in our conversations, in our finances, and in our schedules. Don’t try to work God into your schedule; work your schedule around Him. Put Him first, and everything will work properly."  I have purposely set God as the first and foremost priority in my life, but have work to do in ensuring my daily thoughts and actions reflect this.

Peacekeeper #7: Avoid Strife to Maintain Peace with God 

"God did not create us to live in the war zone all the time. We are supposed to have peace, and when something happens to disturb our peace, we have to work to get it back."  Dang, this is a hard one given the current state of our nation.  I am fortunate that within most of my personal relationships there is peace, but I am having a difficult time balancing wanting to ensure I am doing my part in advocating for those in need in a way that does not also disturb my peace i.e. keeping me awake at night recounting posts I read from people whose beliefs about the world make little to no sense to me.

Peacekeeper #9: Accept Yourself  and Peacekeeper #10: Focus on Your Unique Strengths

"If you are not at peace with yourself, you won’t enjoy your life. You are one person you never get away from, not even for one second. You are everywhere you go, therefore, if you don’t like and accept yourself, you cannot possibly be anything other than miserable."  With this one it's not that I don't like myself, it's that I think I am never enough.  That I am always supposed to be doing more, being more.  What that more is seems to be ever changing, so it may be time to consider that I need to figure out what God thinks is enough.

Peacekeeper #15: Esteem Others as Higher than Yourself

"The only way we can ever hope to have peace in our relationships is if we are willing to humble ourselves and esteem others the way Jesus does. This means that we are not to think we are too good, or too important, to be the ones who initiate the act of making and maintaining peace with someone else."

Peacekeeper #18: Establish Boundaries with People 

Like many people, I was guilty of not establishing and maintaining boundaries in relationships for many years, but after seeing how this adversely affected my health and peace, I made some drastic changes. People don’t always like boundaries, but we are definitely wise to establish them.

Peacekeeper #19: Let Go of Offenses 

"We should form a habit of dealing only with what God Himself prompts us to address, not just everything we feel like confronting, or every little thing that bothers us. I am the type of person who would not be inclined to let anybody get away with anything."

Some I feel I am already doing consistently and others are future goals:
Peacekeeper #1: Trust the Lord of Peace
Peacekeeper #2:  Make Peace Through a Surrendered Will (I suspect this will always be a work in progress!)
Peacekeeper #3:  Know Your Enemy
Peacekeeper #17 Beware of Idle Talk
Peacekeeper #21  Aggressively Pursue Peace

21 is a lot y'all, but I'm going to give it a shot.  Wish me luck!

There's that Light...

at the end of the proverbial tunnel.  While my initial goal for graduating in May has come and gone, I am on track to graduate this summer!  I have all the participants lined up for my study and have even begun conducting my research.  I still have like zero guidance, but what I lack in guidance I make up for in (unfounded!) confidence.  This has truly been an exercise in fake it until you make it, and make it I might just! 

 It feels almost surreal that this is actually happening.  Childcare has gone off (mostly) without a hitch.   Isabella has done well with the sitter.  The first day I went the sitter explained I was going to school just like the Bubble Guppies and that seemed to do the trick.  So now anytime I go anywhere we just tell Isabella I am going to school (like 90% of the time it is totally the truth). 

Hoping I still feel this way in the months to come!

Minimalism

In my quest for peace, it has become abundantly clear that when striving for more...

more money....more status...more possessions...comes more stress.

Even when striving for more of things that appear beneficial...

more education...more friends...more professional experiences...stress can increase.

Now a lack of any of the above can be stressful as well, so I'm guessing the key is to find the right balance.  I am sure that this balance is different for each of us, and so I am currently trying to find the right area for me to cut back first.  I am in the process of reading several books on minimalism.  While many of them focus on reducing clutter in regard to physical possessions, a number of them look at ways of reducing mental clutter as well. 

One of the first books I read this year was An Unhurried Life: Following Jesus' Rhythms of Work and Rest by Alan Fadling.   To this point I have only seen my ability to accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently as a strength.  However as Fadling points out:  "In my preoccupation with efficiency, I miss much that God wants to do in my life and say to me in the moment. Hurry rushes toward the destination and fails to enjoy the journey.".  While it has felt SUPER strange to actively minimize my tasks in both quantity and pace, I have already experienced some peace from this shift in thinking.

Another great read this month has been Soulful Simplicity: How Living with Less Can Lead to So Much More by Courtney Carver.  Carver discussed both minimizing physical possessions and reducing busyness.  While I feel like I was a beast in reducing clutter up in this joint over the last year, she even discussed reducing two areas I guess I previously felt were off limits:  clothes that still fit/are wearable and sentimental items.  

The first I jumped on right away.  She talked about reducing your closet down to 33 items-uh, yeah, that was a hard no, BUT I was able to pare my wardrobe down to things I really did enjoy wearing AND could fit all four seasons of clothing into my side of the closet.  Previously I had fall/winter and spring/summer wardrobes that were rotated with the off season stuff in a trunk and plastic bins.  Some of these articles of clothing I bought my first and second year of teaching!  While I had technically worn all of it over the course of the last few years there were A LOT of items that I felt I could honestly say I had gotten every penny out of them!  Three garbage bags of clothes found their way to Goodwill and one found its final resting place in the trash (jeans with frayed bottoms, shirts with stains or small holes you could only see if you were looking for them, etc.).  It felt super freeing!  The sentimental items I'm still not sure about.  I have three large plastic tubs in the attic that contain ticket stubs, programs, cards, etc. that go all the way back to elementary school.  I'm not quite sure how I feel about actively trying to delete these items from my life (which may also inadvertently delete any accompanying memories:( but it is something I may consider...maybe this summer?  Yeah, let's say that.  This summer:).

Reducing busyness has been a little tricker as, just with thoughts being something I thought were a non-negotiable in my life, always feeling like I should be DOING something has been tough instinct to extinguish.  Currently I am making some progress in things like not (constantly) trying to do something on my phone, but I'm thinking this will be a tougher nut to crack than some of the others.

Calm

Prayer has definitely sustained me through some challenging times.  That said I feel like I sometimes need something specific to "do" to replace feelings of stress and anxiety.  Fortunately God has sent help for people like my by way of meditation.  While some feel meditation works in direct conflict with Christianity I sincerely feel it is a tool the Lord provides that allows us to better follow His word and guidance.  The specific tool He sent to me was an app called Calm.  It. is. AMAZING.

As someone who previously couldn't go two seconds without a thought, the meditations have provided me with specific strategies for how to stop recurring thoughts, grasping on to thoughts, or, sometimes, avoiding thoughts all of which take up unnecessary time and energy.  Calm also helped me to see that, like so many other things, thoughts can be addicting.  I had always assumed that thoughts were something to which I mostly had a passive presence, but I now realize that they while they are something I can't always control I can control my response to them.  It's crazy that while working through my (many) control issues I never realized this before.  These exercises have also brought to light a new understanding of 2 Corinthians 10:5.

I love finding God's fingerprint in the most unexpected places:).

The New Way We Do Church

Ugh, so we tried sooo hard to get Isabella to be down with going to the nursery at church but after a Christmas Eve meltdown that lasted pretty much the whole service (our friend was working in one of the other rooms and saw people taking turns toting our crying kid around in an effort to calm her:( we decided we needed to stop forcing the issue for now.

J.T. suggested we try taking her and watching service from the TV in the coffee shop in our church lobby to try to get her acclimated with us being with her.  So I packed a backpack of stuff to try to keep her occupied and they have some toys in the lobby as well so we made our first attempt.  We ended up taking turns walking around with her until I finally gave up and turned Bubble Guppies on my phone for her to watch (SMH).

We will keep trying for a couple weeks.  Though I'm not thinking this may not be what we are looking for, but appreciate J.T. for trying to come up with a potential solution.

Interesting side note-there are normally about a handful of families with toddlers about Isabella's age out in the lobby wandering around as well.  Both last Sunday and this Sunday I noticed they were all girls.  What is up with girls born in 2017?  Give your mamas and daddies a break, will ya:)?!?!

And then there was one...

When I began this how childcare provider gig I, for some reason, pictured myself working with six kids.  Isabella and five other faceless little people.  Interestingly by late fall of the first year I in fact had a rotation of six kiddos including my own.  However, with time, circumstances and personal preferences (I don't teach any kid but my own how to sleep AND I no longer take kiddos before 8am) we have whittled down to just my own sweet girl and her partner in crime AJ.

The last hanger on-Andie-just had a baby sister born in December and her family decided that her mom would stay home with girls.  So once we hit Christmas we said a final farewell to sweet Andie.

While it was nice having a trio, the duo makes it waaaay easier to get out of the house during the day which turns out to be pretty important to my sanity. 

Traffic in this area is INSANE so it was waaay easier to go to the library, kids gym, kids museum, etc. during the day when traffic is much lighter than in the evening so 2019 has already started with less stress in the keeping my kid entertained department.  Small victory toward a more peaceful existence.

Let's Do This Thing

When I applied for a doctoral program I think my perception of the dissertation was something like the longest report I would every write in my life.  So with that I figured I know how to write papers and reports so I would just have to put my nose to the grindstone and bang it out.  Hard work?  Sure.  But never in a million years did I think getting from the inception of my dissertation proposal to actually beginning to conduct the research would have taken one full calendar year. 

Yet here we are almost exactly one year since my dissertation proposal class began and just today I had the first introductory meeting with my first participant.  I now have a much better understanding as to why only 50% of PhD students actually finish.  I also have a better understanding as to why God positioned things to allow me to work on it while my profession is officially SAHM.  If I had tried to to do this, raise a toddler, and work full time?  LOL for days as I would for sure be living on the other side of this statistic.

But--long awaited--squeal!  I am ready to roll.

My plans to graduate in May went up in smoke when I couldn't begin my research in the fall.  My dissertation chair mentioned something about the possibility of an August graduation.  My worst case scenario at this point is December.  Fingers crossed there are no major bumps in the road moving forward and that, like a play the dress rehearsal aka dissertation proposal process disaster means a near flawless performance or in this case dissertation process and defense!

OneWord365 2019 Edition

I had always been a New Year's Resolution person with some years being more successful than others, but this OneWord thing has been amazing.  With resolutions it was kind of cut and dried.  I was successful or not.  There was little room for life to happen and revision to take place.  However with this OneWord365 it provides a focus without the potential for impending failure which takes off the pressure and allows it to take shape and grow organically.

So this year I am building off of last year's word.  I have gotten a taste and I want more. 

I need more. 

It's time for more. 

God has done an amazing job of setting me up to recognize this, accept this, and has already put tools in place and wheels in motion.

My OneWord365 word for 2019 is: