Kim 365

A year and a half ago I summed my life up in three words: tired, weary, and exhausted. I was living with so much chronic pain in the way of muscle tension and headaches. I would find mild relief with chiropractic adjustments, and physiotherapy treatments, but I was stumbling through my days with Advil, coffee, simple carbs, not enough sleep, and wondering why I felt so awful.

It was time to get down to the roots of my problems. My pain boiled down to a lack of physical strength and vitality. I could do a lot of things to manage my pain, but it didn’t go away because I wasn’t dealing with the underlying issue of my body being weak and poorly fed. I could not keep doing what I was doing and simply hope for better results. I reached a crossroads. I’d had it with feeling sick and tired all the time.

So I did something about it.

I started exercising and paying attention to the food I was eating. Really revolutionary, right? It is amazing how quickly things started the change. I started exercising for 30 minutes a day, eating well, drinking copious amounts of water, and my quality of life skyrocketed. My aches and pains turned into good aches from my body actually doing something, my headaches disappeared, I had more energy, and I dropped over 10 lbs. It’s also a plus that I stopped popping Vitamin I (Ibuprofen) every 4-6 hours.

People sometimes wonder how I manage to exercise everyday. We’re a single income family homeschooling 4 kids: I don’t have time or money to go to a gym. I work out in my living room while my kids are banished to their rooms for 30 minutes so that I can get a workout in for the day. Working out gives me strength and endurance to keep up with my kids, clears out my mental cobwebs, balances my emotions. Everyone’s quality of life is improved because Mommy forced herself to push play and get things done.

Eating well is really not that complicated. Less junk, more veggies. Less bread, more protein. Carbs are not my enemy, but they are not the only thing I eat!

It comes down to the fact that I was not glorifying God in the way that I was treating my body. I was selfish and short-sighted when I would fuel my body with caffeine and sugar, and make excuses for why getting up and moving was too hard.

Is it hard? Yes. And it’s worth it.

Being a doer is something that has been on my mind for a while. Thinking is easy. Action is hard. I told you that I’m writing a book, and I started with passion and fire, and it slowed to a crawl, then stopped. I made excuses for why that was okay.

“I tried getting up before the sun and writing at the beginning of the day, but I write so much better at night.”

“It’s been a long day and I’m tired, I don’t have the energy to write tonight.”

“I just need some time to get my daily life in order. If I can get more of a rhythm in my home, then I’ll be able to work in a regular writing time.”

“I can’t write my book right now because I feel like I’m in a spiritual desert. How can I write about being a faithful disciple when I’m not one?”

My excuses compounded to the point that I immobilized myself. They fed into my fears and I believed my own bad press. What it boiled down to is that it’s too hard, and I’m not capable.

My goal had been to write for at least an hour every day. An hour really isn’t a long time, but for something that I need quiet and solitude to accomplish, an hour became a mountain I could not scale. Rather than give in to defeat, I’m changing the rules. 15 minutes a day. That’s all I need to get done.

I’m following along with Jon Acuff’s DO Summer challenge to choose one skill and work on it for 15 minutes every day for 3 months. By September 8 I will have spent 1500 minutes developing my skill as a writer. My daily writing will sometimes be found here, and other times it will be spent on my book. I hope this will be a push in the direction of making writing a habit.

Because what’s worse than working hard to do what you know you should do is making excuses and living in fear of it. I’m tired of fearing my failure, I’m tired of excusing my inaction. It’s time to do something again.

For ten years I have been navigating the minefield of Mother’s Day. As the years go by I have learned one important thing that helps to make this day enjoyable. It can be applied in so many situations, but I find it particularly helpful on days like today.

It’s very simple.

Drop your expectations.

That’s it. Don’t expect your husband to know you’d like waffles with strawberry sauce and coffee for breakfast. In bed. Don’t expect that your kids will make you a card and a gluey mess of a craft. Don’t expect that your husband knows you don’t want him to buy overpriced flowers when he could get them cheaper next week. Don’t expect that your children will obey you. Don’t expect that everyone around you will treat you like a queen for a day. They don’t know what kind of royal treatment you are expecting, and even if that were their goal, all their best efforts would likely fall short of your expectations and you’ll all be yelling at each other by the day’s end. Not that I’d know.

I know the job is hard, and I know it takes sacrifice and is filled with thankless work. Believe me, I know. I also know that I don’t do the endless work of mothering for praise and thanks. I do it because it is who I am: I am a mother. I have birthed four miracles into this world, and I have given myself for them and to them because it is the holy task given to me.

God in his wisdom knew better than I, that I think of myself too much. In my mothering I am taught sacrificial love and am reminded of the great love that Jesus has loved me with. He didn’t just get up in the night to calm night terrors, he left his throne to take on the form of a lowly human so that he could serve me to the extreme of taking the punishment for my sin. God now calls me his daughter, and he is my Father. I’ve already gotten far more than I deserve.

If I can learn to drop my expectations, I realize how rich I already am.

I have grandiose ideas about what it means to be a writer. I picture an idyllic world in which I wake up to a magical haze in my bedroom, and everything is coloured with wonder and surprise. My feet meet the floor with anticipation of what will unfold before my eager eyes that day. Everything, a welcome joy to the unfolding narrative before me. All of life’s a delicious story; I would drink it up with unmatched enthusiasm, and it would spill out of me in words woven with spark and creativity. I am, after all, a writer.

The trouble is that is not my reality. There are dirty dishes, and plenty of them. The laundry never ends, and the boxes on my to-do list are never all checked off. There are children to teach, young souls to be discipled, and in the middle of it I am a hot mess who can’t get her act together. I can’t make the time to get food on the table, let alone write.

I beat myself up for not waking at the crack of dawn to enjoy an hour of uninterrupted writing before the demands of the day meet me head on. I have things to say, but sleep has things to say to me as well. Before I know it, weeks have passed, and I have neglected to write a thing. Then I am faced with the obvious internal conflict, “What kind of writer doesn’t write? You’re not a writer. How are you going to write a book when you can’t drag your uninspired butt out of bed and get to work?”

The truth is, I don’t know. But I know that I will. This journey will have times of triumph and trial, and I will learn to ride the waves when I find my feet, and take the beating when I lose my footing and the waves come crashing down on my head. I’ll get back up and try again, not because I am strong and dedicated but because Jesus is. He never fails, and by the power of his Spirit I will press on. My hope is in God, not in myself. He is the one who calls, and he is the one who makes my path straight, and illuminates the way. He puts breath in my lungs, and enables me to take my shaky steps toward him.

“Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world.”
C.S. Lewis, Voyage to Venus: Perelandra

Many people have asked what I’m writing about. I give different answers at different times: I guess it may change as I put flesh on the bones of my outline. The shortest answer is that I’m writing about discipleship. A more detailed response is that it’s about the discipline of being a disciple of Jesus Christ, the life change that takes place when we remove ourselves from the throne of our lives and yield to King Jesus as Lord and Savior. It’s about what Jesus has done, and what we do in response to his finished work. His is a call to come and die, to leave behind the old person and put on the new. We work hard because we’re loved by the King of all kings, not to gain his love. His love of sinners compels them to action.

It’s been a month since I announced my writing project. It has been a month of wild ups and downs. I’ll go from intense focus and positivity to deep discouragement. Writing is something I have a difficult time doing when I am distracted, and with four children  it is not something I can make headway with during the day. There is always someone wanting me, needing me, or causing trouble that I need to intervene with. Knowing my inability to focus outside of a vacuum, I’ve been getting up before the sun to write. I joked with Clay that by the time I’m done I’ll be able to say I wrote this book in my sleep since I nod off so often. This, an attempt at keeping my heart light when the task seems too much.

I’m trying to write about discipline, and I knew the writing process would be an act of discipline for me.
“I’m going to discipline so hard!” I thought as I began.

Then I hit a wall and couldn’t get my thoughts into words and things fell apart. Last night was the lowest point yet in my book writing process. I wanted to quit. I wanted to throw it all away. I felt so stupid for ever thinking I could accomplish something of this size. A blog post every now and then on a rather inactive blog is one thing, a book is something else entirely. I got so mad, mostly at myself and my inability to collect my thoughts, and had a big ugly cry. I fell short of my own expectations, and hoped quitting would be an easy out.

I told Clay before I even started writing that the hardest part of writing my book was not going to be the actual writing, but the spiritual opposition I would face through the process. Yesterday was a prime example of what I knew would be coming, and I floundered. I was assaulted by a host of lies and accusations. I tried to fight my own fight, then I laid down and took a beating.

I wanted so badly to be able to walk away from this dream, yet I know that is impossible. Why? The short answer is because I know God has laid it on my heart to do this, and he will not let me walk away. I know he has given me things to say, and has a lot to teach me about who he is through this process, as well as things he wants to teach me about myself. Quitting would be avoiding the inevitable. God has given me a task to accomplish, and I know he will pursue me. I can surrender now, or later. He loves me when I gain ground, and he loves me when I hit these walls. He loves me on the days the words pour out of me like water, and he loves me when my heart and mind are a desert. He simply loves me. He’ll guide me through this and provide a way to accomplish this task that is too great for me.

So I rest in him, and I work hard to reach the goal before me. This is what my book is all about, and I guess it has to start in my own heart before I can get it into words for anyone else.

A few months ago I wrote a post about being a doer, not just a thinker.

There are things in my life that I think about a lot. Things I think I will do someday, things that seem high and lofty, things that are beyond my present reach. Do I think that waiting long enough will bring them closer to my grasp? I must, and yet the opposite is usually true. The longer I wait to do something, the more insurmountable it becomes. My thoughts create excuse after excuse for why I can’t. These goals steadily rise higher into the clouds, and I am left in a valley of self-pity. I’ll never get there. It’s too hard.

I’ve always hoped I would someday write a book. Something meaningful and deep, that pours from my soul.

The thing about writing is that most people tell you it’s so hard. On more than one occasion I’ve heard people compare it to giving birth – as joyous as I feel birth is, I’ll attest to the fact that there is some discomfort involved. (Alright, let’s call it what it is, it’s pain. People who tell you you can have a pain-free birth are lying or disillusioned.) Why would I willingly sign myself up to do something I know is going to be difficult?

Recently I’ve read that writing doesn’t have to be difficult, and I can pound a book out in a month if I have the determination to sit down and write for at least an hour every day. As nice as that sounds, it also sounds too good to be true. I believe that writing might be easier than I thought, but I don’t think it’s easy. Rarely is something of value easy. When you pour yourself into something, it is at a cost, and that is the opposite of easy and free.

So I’ve found myself at a crossroads. I want to write. The act of writing a book has not quite reached the heights of Mt. Everest in my mind, but it’s somewhere in the Rockies at this point. I can choose to watch it slip away, and as the years pass I can tell myself I would have written a great book if I had ever actually dedicated myself to the hard work of doing it. Ten years from now I could look back and wonder what would have happened if I had just gone for it. Or I could stop thinking and do.

I’m telling you now, I’m going to do it. I don’t know how long it will take me. Every writer I read for advice gives me different stories of how to make it work. But I’m going to do it.

Watch me.

Sometimes God showers his grace on us in big, glorious ways; often, it comes in small acts of providence. Today I again experienced the latter.

I was completely knocked out this morning with a horrific headache. I’ll skip a gory description, but just say that the pain was so severe at times that all I could do was cry out in pain, as if I were in labour. There was however no apparent purpose to this pain. I was stuck in bed except for the times I was running to the bathroom, sick to my stomach. It was not pretty.

My children spent these hours watching Netflix, fighting about what to watch on Netflix, as yelling about who could and could not sit beside them. As lunchtime was upon us, and I drifted in and out of sleep, I wondered what I would do about feeding the kids. Perhaps I would just have Markus serve everyone Cheerios, since there was no way I could get up to help them.

And then the doorbell rang. It was my mom. She went to buy the kids chicken nuggets and fries, while I prayed a prayer of thankfulness to my Father in heaven who loves this daughter enough to send help when the need is great. Amazing grace.

As a child, war seemed like a distant fabled tale, but the older I get the closer it feels to me. This morning we observed a ceremony of remembrance, paying tribute to the men and women who have served our country and are currently doing so. I was struck with a deeper realization than ever of what the cost of freedom is.  I’m sure the recent attacks on our own soil have made the reality of threatened freedom much more real to me, and I am so grateful for those who have sacrificed to make possible the freedom we enjoy in Canada.

Thinking about doing something, and actually doing something are two very different things.

I often think about walking the leafy path at Beaver Creek, but I rarely make the time to actually get there. I think about mastering a new song on the piano, yet I don’t often make time to sit down and practice.  I think about all the books I want to read to my kids, but I assume said children will be difficult and unable to sit still and I will inevitably lose my mind (likely true!) so I don’t even start the books. I think about having my friends over for a party just because we’re friends and I enjoy their company, but I don’t take the initiative to throw that party because I’m busy and so is everyone else. The list goes on and on with all the things I think of doing, but don’t.

Writing is one of those things. I think about it too much, and don’t do it enough.

Thinking is a good thing, but doing: doing is also very good.

I’d like to be more of a doer.

How do you use Facebook? Is there a certain part of your life that you put online for people to see, and keep the rest private, or do you put it all out there? I ask because after using Facebook for the past 5 years, I feel like I have no idea how to use it.

• I don’t want to use it to give you a play by play on my life. If it were pertinent information to you, you would likely be involved.
• I don’t want to use it to talk about the weather. Look out your damn window.
• I don’t want to use it to tell you what I cooked for supper. People who do that usually annoy me.
• I don’t want to use it to say that I’m tired and ponder why I haven’t gone to bed. No one cares and I should go to bed.
• I don’t want to use it to tell you that I’m sick. I don’t need you picturing me with kleenex shoved up my nostrils. Oh great, now you’re doing just that.
• I don’t want to use it to tell you that my kids are sick. Then I look like a negligent mom for not pumping them full of every superfood and vitamin known to man. Or you’ll know I let them eat their boogers.

All silliness aside, I’m serious. I don’t know how to use Facebook effectively. None of this information is really helpful at the end of the day.

Anything that might be helpful and fuel constructive discussion, Facebook tends to not be the platform to share it on. If you post anything political, you get hearty cheers of agreement, or ridiculous argument. Nobody’s opinion sways due to what you said. If you post anything spiritual, you get choruses of ‘amen’s, or defensive arguments from people who don’t see things as you do. Does anyone walk away from reading something on Facebook and say to themselves, “Wow, I see things so differently now!” I’m guessing I’m not the only proud person in the world who would answer ‘no’.

So why don’t I just delete my account? I don’t know. Sometimes I consider it. Then the creeper in me gets curious and I need to stick my nose into what people are doing. Business they want me to get into, because they put it online for all their friends to see. I’m not sure I’m much closer to you if I know you made pot roast for supper though. Should I pare down my friends list? If I unfriend you will you still speak to me in real life? Oh wait, we probably never see each other anyway.

There really is helpful online community to be had. I find a lot of encouragement in interacting with church family on Facebook. It’s nice to easily connect with far-away family with a quick message or photo. It’s also helpful for connecting with local homeschoolers.

So what’s a girl to do?