Sacred Mundane: The Blog

What habits have WORKED? This is the question I was considering last week, as I both reflected on the past and gazed ahead into the future. Even as we considered our own personal failures (and learned from them) we are also wise to consider what has really worked for us, and why. This will powerfully inform our future decisions.

For me personally, there are three (simple!) daily habits I wish every person had. They are not impressive. You will not be wowed when you read them. But they are the 3 daily habits that have most helped me lead a simple, disciplined, healthy life that frees me up to flourish, love, serve, and give my time and attention to what matters most in life. Here they are:

• Read the Word and pray.

  The one simple habit that will truly transform your life, is simply spending time in God’s Word every day. Please.  I’m just starting my 19th time through the Scriptures, and every year there’s something new. Every year things make a bit more sense. Every year I can see the Story of God a bit clearer. Every year He speaks new life into my soul and brings fresh conviction and clearer guidance. I wrote more here about a RETURN to God’s Word. 

Many people ask me, “How do you read the Bible?” There’s no right or wrong way, but I suggest a simple 3-step process of thinking through:

–> What does this SAY? (Think or write, in your own words, what the passage is about.)

–> What does this MEAN? (What seems to be the spirit or essence of this passage? Why do you think the author wants you to know this? Why are certain details included? What is the purpose or intent of this passage being recorded for us?)

–> How will I RESPOND? (Simply praying Scripture, asking applicational questions (i.e. “Like Abraham/Sarah with Hagar, How am I tempted to get God’s promises in my own schemes? How am I tempted to use people to get my own way? Where am I doubting God’s provision?) and asking the Holy Spirit to bring specific conviction on how He wants you to obey or respond to the passage.

Again, there are lots of apps and plans and gadgets and things for helping you along the way. I’m a simple girl, so I just do 3/1. 3 chapters Old Testament, 1 chapter New Testament. All you need is 2 bookmarks and you’re good to go! If you do that you’ll finish by the end of October/early November, so that gives you a little wiggle room for those days you inevitably miss. I highly recommend the simple 3/1 plan!

• When hungry, eat whole food.

  This one is two-fold. I realize I’m treading on sensitive ground here so please hear my  heart: Most of our nation’s weight issues could be resolved if we only ate when we were hungry. I know that sounds obvious, but I know from past experience that many of us don’t even know what waiting for true hunger feels like. We eat when we feel like it, when it’s “mealtime,” and often obsess over what we eat without giving much to whether or not we even need to eat at all!

True hunger is very clear. It isn’t the same as craving. It is a burning, empty feeling with an accompanying rumbling or growling in your stomach, located just under your ribcage on your lefthand side. I find that if I simply surrender my body to how God created it, and only eat food when my body actually asks for it, I naturally land at a healthy weight. Then, when our stomaches do growl, we are wise to simply eat food, actual food, the kind that God created, that grows out of the ground or comes from nature. Again, we can get twisted up in the latest food fads or diets, and don’t get me wrong, I love nutrition and think that food-science is fascinating, but for the most part, if we eat whole foods when we’re hungry, we’d be good to go!

The great thing about just simply waiting for hunger is that it forces us to surrender control. For me, the hardest part of fasting is giving up control of doing and eating whatever I want whenever I want. By choosing to only eat when you are hungry you are acknowledging that God created your body with a God-given mechanism for determining when you need to eat, and that you will surrender your cravings to His will, and choose to submit to His design. It’s a way to worship God with our bodies!

• Walk.

Again, there are many exercise programs out there, and I’m all for you finding the one that works just right for you. But I’d also suggest, the most simple exercise, for any fitness level, that will keep you decently fit and able to be actively involved in life: WALK. True, you won’t get any medals or t-shirts, you can’t post pictures of yourself flexing, you won’t get ripped abs or a so-called Beach Body, but you will be putting into practice a powerful habit or moving every day, of getting fresh air and getting your heartrate up and blood pumping and breathing deep.

I make a simple habit of walking 40-minutes a day.  We have a hilled driveway, so it makes for a great workout, going up and down the hill. 10 laps is about 2.5 miles, and that makes a good amount for me. Again, I’m not knocking all those great fitness programs out there, but I find that many of them tend to be very self-focused. I don’t want to be focused on self or spend an inordinate amount of time or energy worrying about my body because Jesus told me not to! I want to exercise it enough that I have energy for the life He’s called me to live. Walking does that for me.

So there you have it. I told you it wasn’t impressive. 🙂 But perhaps there’s someone out there who needed these three simple things. I hope they can be life-giving and encouraging. You don’t have to be a Bible scholar, you don’t have to find the magic diet, you don’t have to do the hardest workouts ever. Spend time with your Father and ask Him for some simple guidance in what simple habits might help you this year. These have been my three, I hope you find yours too. Thanks for reading!

Happy New Year Friends! I’ve been chewing on some New Year thoughts, and wanted to share a brief series called RESOLVE, reflecting on some of the ways we can grow in a happier, healthy, God-honoring life. Just some food for thought as we intentionally determine the course of our days this year. Hope it’s helpful! Thanks so much for reading.

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Sometimes my friends and I reflect on how different it is now that Google and smart phones and Pinterest are at our fingertips at all times. Back in the day, you learned from a person. If you were a young wife and wanted to bake a pie, you asked your mom, or aunt, or grandma. She probably slipped you a butter-stained well-worn recipe card, then showed you how to roll the dough and pinch the edges just so. At least, that’s how my grandma taught me to bake.

Nowadays, if you want to bake a pie, you thumb “Best pie ever” into Pinterest or Google and approximately 3 million recipes, all with professional pics, come flooding before your eyes. You probably choose one from an expert: Pioneer Woman, Martha Stewart, or Ina Garten perhaps. At least I do.

Then, when we want to get in better shape, we turn to Jillian Michaels, and when we want to lose a few pounds we fork out a fortune for the top-notch nutrition system, and when we want to get our finances under control we sign up for Financial Peace University. All of these are great, and there are most certainly some awesome experts out there and I commend any efforts to learn and grow in these areas.

But sometimes the onslaught of all these experts can leave us feeling a little overwhelmed. I remember reading a book on marketing and the author insisted that in order to make it big and sell lots of whatever you’re selling, you have to bake in the Wow. That is, it has to be beyond the best. It has to absolutely WOW everyone.

Ok, fine. But as I read that, I mentally sifted through all the different arenas where I am called upon for leadership or love. I thought about being a wife, I thought about my home, my meal-planning and cooking, cleaning and organizing, I thought about raising and discipling my children, about homeschooling them, I thought about being a discipler of women, of being a pastor’s wife, a blogger, a conference speaker, a children’s ministry teacher, an author, a friend, a daughter of a disabled mom, of being a housemate and neighbor. And then I’m also so crazy as to think it’s not too much to ask that I even sneak in a hot shower 2-3 times a week!

I wrote in the margin of the book: I cannot bake in the Wow to every area of life. 

And that’s just it. The challenge with being surrounded by experts is that these people bake in the Wow to their own area. Great! But then we turn to all of them, and assume we need to bake in their wow in that area as well, and with a quick click we can turn to so many experts at once and begin thinking we need to bake Martha Stewart cakes while rocking Jillian Michaels bodies living in Pinterest-worthy homes. Back in the day, we would have turned to maybe 1-3 people to help us grow in some area. Now, we have hundreds right in the palm of our hand. 

Last week, I had the joy of getting together with a friend and teaching her to sew a skirt. It was a simple thing, and I’m sure she could have figured it out on her own, or YouTubed a tutorial. But we had such a fun morning, cutting and stitching, singing along to worship music. Heidi joined us, and we all we were able to have rich conversation in the midst of learning a new skill. And I realized that morning, the thing we miss when we only tap into experts, is learning through relationship. 

This is why downloading a podcast or even reading a book will never be the same as sitting together with people who know you and studying, learning, growing, discussing together. They are the ones who can read your body language, see a tear in your eye, ask you a hard question, speak a Spirit-led word of encouragement. They are the ones who know your mom is sick, or your husband lost his job, or you’re trying to get pregnant. They are the ones who will you see you fail — and succeed — and weep and rejoice with you all along the way.

There is just no substitute for learning and growing in community. Real community. No celebrity or expert can come close the value of learning from each other. From living in community and asking questions, asking for help, making known our weaknesses and struggles, and also offering our gifts and talents and wisdom as well.

So, though it might not top most people’s lists, I RESOLVE this year, to learn and grow in relationship. 

{Thanks for reading.}