#9 Streamline your receipt system {52 bites}
In our house we have two extreme temperaments when it comes to stuff: The Keep-Everything person and the Toss-Everything person. I’ll let you guess which one I am.
The Keep-Everything person will not toss. Everything is held onto “just in case.” The Toss-Everything person will not keep. Voting cards and tax documents are virtually the only paper items which can survive this person’s ruthless purging habits.
Oddly enough, we both can have trouble finding things. Keep-Everything can’t find things because they are lost under the pile of other things. Toss-Everything can’t find things because she threw them all away. 🙂
Balance.
This bite is really rather simple. Tsh just wants us to streamline our receipt system so we’re not drowning in a sea of unnecessary paper, while still tracking important purchases and documents. For me, this bite is pretty simple. All large purchases are done online, so the receipt is electronic. Small stuff is all cash, so there isn’t a need to balance anything. Medical and housing expense receipts are needed for taxes, so I file those in their respective files. I think that’s about it. Maybe the easiest way to streamline receipts is to not buy much stuff.
If you own your own business, chances are you have much more to track. So how do you do it? Can you offer some advice to all the Keep-Everything and Toss-Everything people out there? How do you decide what to keep and what to toss?
And again, if this bite is too easy for this week, consider heading back and tackling some important ones you don’t want to miss …
Create a Family Purpose Statement
Make a Debt-Free Plan
Wake Up Earlier (Summer is a great–and easy!–time to start this habit!)
Happy weekend! Thanks for reading…
When all is still
The house is still.
Yes, that’s rare. Just now I stood in the kitchen, breath held in the silence, and asked God, “What do you want me to do?” The house is clean (relatively speaking) and emails are (mostly) caught up. Posts are written. Lunch is eaten. (Mousetraps are set.) I have no big project looming at the moment. It feels strange.
What, Lord, do you want me to do?
Be still and know.
So I came, sat, talked with Him.
How do we mind the gap? The gap between where we are and where we want to be. Where we are and what we’re trusting God will do. The waiting place. The period in between, the waiting, the space in the middle where there is no movement.
The space that’s still.
My heart, so restless, resists this rest. We are addicted to movement, are we not? I tell Him, “When I see movement I know You are there. When it’s still, just so still, it’s hard to see You.”
You see?
When there are no ripples, how can I be certain He’s in the water with me?
But perhaps the ripples are simply hidden in the fog?
Florence Chadwick’s story often haunts me. She swims for 16 hours across the English Channel, then quits in the fog, later finding she was only 1 mile from the shore.
She says, “If I could have seen the shore, I would have made it.” Ah, yes.
Perhaps the greatest temptation to quit comes just a mile before the shore, when the fog clouds our vision and the stillness feels unbearable.
God, I don’t see you doing anything.
Like disciples in the boat, tossed by the storm as Jesus sleeps: “Aren’t you going to do something?!”
“You of little faith; why are you afraid?”
Afraid of His stillness in the midst of my storm?
But His stillness isn’t His absence.
His stillness is His presence. And the thousand gifts we count remind us of His presence. Even His movement, at all times.
So although my restless heart loves movement, makes it easy to detect the fingerprints of God, I am learning to see His hand in the stillness.
The shore may be just on the other side of the fog. Ripples of Him may be hidden, but they are there.
Because He is there.
“The LORD your God goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you.” Deut. 31:6
Rest.
{Thanks for reading.}
When everything's infected and infested …
I could feel that same rubber band stretch tight again. But this time I’m not mad at my kids. For a week I can’t rest my right middle finger on the ‘K’ key. Can’t stretch it up to strike the “I” so I just peck around it with my other fingers. My silly finger had a hangnail that bizarrely became infected, so bad my finger was all swollen and red-hot hurting. Couldn’t get it to heal. Weeks before Jeff got some bizarre sort of spider bite while outside in the grass. 2 1/2 weeks of Popeye arm, red-hot swelling and pain, headaches, antibiotics, having it drained, watching his muscle be eaten away by whatever poison’s inside. What in the world? Then Dutch gets some little spot on this chin, just a little impetigo, that won’t go away, grows and hurts and itches and I read on the WebMD website: “Common in children, particularly those in unhealthy living conditions.” Oh for crying out loud! Of course I know it’s common in all little children, but between my infection, Jeff’s infection, and Dutch’s infection I’m frustrated–why is everything infected?!!
Of course not everything is. Some things are just infested.
Our house that is. And our car.
With mice.
Their evidence is everywhere. Nibbled boxes. Food gone. Shredded paper towels. Mouse poop. I’m livid. We set traps, and last night they manage to eat all the treats off the three traps without getting caught. Tricky little buggers!
Between our three infections, the evidence of some dangerous hobo spider in our yard and the mice everywhere I look (this morning they left their mark all over a stack of bathroom towels), I am crazy. I escape Sunday afternoon to run some errands alone, only to show up at Costco and discover I’ve left my card at home. A rational person would have reasoned that they’d give me a pass and let me in, but I’m not rational. There’s mice in my house, poisonous spiders in my yard, and everyone is infected with something. I can’t think straight.
On the drive home I ask it flat-out: “Ok Lord, what is it? We’re all infected and infested … what is it? I know you use the physical realm to speak to our spiritual needs. What is it?”
Silence. The whole way home.
“Ok, Lord. What’s the deal with that?”
Later that night, I take the kids to church. I had explained to Dutch the day before that he wouldn’t be able to go to his class because of the sore on his face. He was so disappointed, and said that he was going to pray and ask God to heal his face before church so that he could go to his class. So he did that night. And the next morning. And then, Sunday night, as we’re getting out of the car, he’s still praying as we walk through the parking lot, “Dada God, please heal my face so I can go to my class.” The boy has tremendous faith, and to be fair, God has answered some remarkable prayers of his, so he has reason to believe!
But this time I see he needs a further lesson in prayer.
“Babe, I know God can heal your face. But maybe what God wants more than your face to be healed is for you to learn to sit with Mama in church, to learn self-control, to learn to worship God with the mommies and daddies, to listen to the sermon and learn about Jesus there. Maybe that’s more important than your face being healed right now. Maybe God’s using your owie to move you to where He wants you to be.”
He protests for a moment, but then he lets it sink in.
I do too.
Are any of us immune to the universal human addiction to fast, smooth, effortless movement? To immediate answers to prayer? To mice-less houses and infection-less bodies? Those are good things, but our God is so great He can use mice and infections to move us, sit us down, take us out of our normal routine to teach us something new.
To move us to where He wants us to be.
Honestly, I don’t know what that “something new” is and don’t know where He wants me to be. Although I know a good place to start:
At His feet.
And so, the mice, the spiders, the infections of life–they drive us to His feet. Again and again and again.
So that’s what I’ll do again today: Sit at his feet …
and set some better traps.
{Thanks for reading.}
How to really bring Him praise…
Outside my bedroom window is a tall birch tree.
It stretches its white-barked arms high toward heaven. Right beside it stands a cherry tree. It dwarfs in comparison to the birch–only half its height–the dark branches bowing their humble heads. But the cherry tree is dazzling white with blossoms, the promise of summer’s bounty. Below both of these trees is … dirt. The dirt isn’t doing much at all. No blossoms, no beautiful branches stretched high. But I’m sure glad the dirt is there! And the dirty is doing exactly what it was made to do. Being dirt.
And praising God.
Psalm 148 tell us how everything brings God praise:
Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord from the heavens;
praise him in the heights above.
Praise him, all his angels;
praise him, all his heavenly hosts.
Praise him, sun and moon;
praise him, all you shining stars.
Praise him, you highest heavens
and you waters above the skies.Let them praise the name of the Lord,
for at his command they were created,
and he established them for ever and ever—
he issued a decree that will never pass away.Praise the Lord from the earth,
you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,
lightning and hail, snow and clouds,
stormy winds that do his bidding,
you mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars,
wild animals and all cattle,
small creatures and flying birds,
kings of the earth and all nations,
you princes and all rulers on earth,
young men and women,
old men and children.Let them praise the name of the Lord,
for his name alone is exalted;
his splendor is above the earth and the heavens.
And he has raised up for his people a horn,
the praise of all his faithful servants,
of Israel, the people close to his heart.Praise the Lord.
The birch tree out my window is praising the Lord. The cherry tree is too, and so is the dirt. How? By being and doing exactly what God created it to be and do. Simple. No stress, no striving, no jealousy or competition. Just rest, life … praise.Could it be the same for us?
You don’t have to be like her.
You don’t have to have a ministry like hers.
You don’t have to have a house like hers.
You don’t have to have kids like hers.
You don’t have to take to your bed in sorrow when the world tells you you’re dirt.
Even dirt can praise God.
It brings God praise when we exult in, rest in, rejoice in, who He made us to be. As He allows painful trials, it isn’t that He’s destroying us, He’s simply helping us become more of who He made us to be. More ourselves. More fully able to bring Him praise.
Who are you?
Sacred Mundane. Today He created me to love one man and two little squirrels. To clean the bathroom, read books about bugs, and write a few words in between. That’s how I’ll bring Him praise today…
What about you? By simply being and doing what He created you to be and do, How will you bring Him praise today?