Monday Mindfulness
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NOW
I’ve heard it said that NOW is the only moment in time we have that touches eternity, therefore it’s the only moment we have to make a difference. NOW is always happening and it’s true, how we handle the NOW impacts everything and everyone around us. It can be a daunting responsibility to think of it as if we are constantly living on the precipice of change, ruled by our own free actions, but what a privilege to have that amount of power! God gave us this power and it is by this power that we show all manner of love and gratitude by living each day for Him.
NOW: three small letters instilled with such power! When something is urgent and asked of you NOW or something you weren’t expecting suddenly happens NOW, it can be jilting. You may feel like you don’t even have a say in what happens in life anymore. Your mind jumps straight from the sense of having an option or free will to just figuring out how to cope with it or do it and get it done NOW. It’s no coincidence that NOW contains the word OW .
OWS slip into our lives in the NOWS, in those moments where we react instead of respond to what is happening…
OW: an onomatopoeia signifying pain, two letters that bear such weight. Weight ranging from a stubbed toe to a broken heart…or a broken spirit… we may not always utter this word allowed when we hurt but we feel it. We feel the OW and sometimes…most times we don’t know why or how it came about. OWS slip into our lives in the NOWS, in those moments where we react instead of respond to what is happening, because we were unable to embrace the power of the first half of NOW….NO
NO: two little letters that have the power to protect, the power to save not only ourselves from heartache and pain but also from causing pain for others. NO doesn’t just protect us, it is not selfish, we don’t need permission to wield this word from anyone. We are free to say NO point blank, period, full stop. No explanation necessary because especially in those times when we stand to cause the most pain or distress, discomfort or destruction in our lives or the lives of others, we need NO and that is clear as day to us! It is the YHW that we don’t always understand so sometimes we hesitate because we can’t explain it until that three letter word completes and OW is upon us.
The YHW makes clearer sense in the rearview mirror but often is a little blurry and backwards to us in the moment. When we look back we will see WHY… When you get to the other side of these moments in time and you see the WHY clearly in that reflection, I hope you more often can find resolution for the guilt of saying NO in the moment instead of the dread of OW from falling victim to the “urgencies” and things done to us. We will all have samples of both in our lives and that is okay because in the end, if we belong to God we will also look back and see how everywhere we met and struggled with a NOW, God still WON!
Blessings FAM!
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MM.005: Be Present
Sometimes the difference between a bad habit and a good one is simply a perspective shift. I believe that shift is grace. If you struggle with procrastination like I do (I may [definitely] be writing this the morning of it’s posting yet again) then it is easy to beat yourself up every time you realize you have mere hours, or minutes even, to accomplish something that you either promised yourself or, even worse, someone else! There is nothing more self deprecating in my personal book then letting someone else down on a promise I have made them. Even little things matter so much to me when I know someone else is counting on it. That probably stems from something much deeper that I need to work through but it is not exactly the point of today’s post.
Today I want to expound on the fact that, in those moments of realizing that you’ve unintentionally procrastinated once again, you have a choice to make. Your choice is between a) beating yourself up about it and guilt tripping yourself over it even once you’ve completed it because, if you had not procrastinated, you could have done it so much better! or b) give yourself grace and realize the reason it may have slipped your mind is that the habit of being present, that you have been hoping to practice and be better at, is beginning to come easier. You shouldn’t have to work so hard to remember to do the things you care about. I know this can get touchy and I am trying my best to keep out of the weeds on this topic but, some things (hobbies, jobs, relationships…etc) just do not matter!
Okay so maybe I am going to have to psychoanalyze myself a bit deeper today. The bible tells us to “let [our] yes be yes and [our] no be no, so that [we] may not fall under condemnation” (James 5:12). We cannot do all things. We are human and have our limits. It also says that we “have the right to do anything — but not everything is beneficial [we] have the right to do anything — but not everything is constructive” (1 Cor 10:23) It is not that these things don’t matter at all but they just may not need to matter to you. Even good things may not be for us to take care of. helping the homeless matters but your gifting may not be what is necessary to meet that need for people. Healing the sick matters but you may not be a doctor. Feeding the hungry matters but you might stink at cooking. They may be starving but eating the food you make may seem like a worse punishment to them then the starvation hahaha. These are broad examples but you get my point, we are not all made to do all the things!
The good news is, you are made to do something! The challenge we have is to figure that out and the only way we can truly discover it is by testing the waters in a few areas until we find it. The part we need to be better at, once we find something that fits, is letting go of the things that we realize are no longer meant for us, instead of hanging on to all the things and trying to fit more in on top because “it’s a good thing so i can’t drop it”. There are a lot of good things and some of them may have been your calling for a while but the time for those things may need to be over. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Eccl 3:1)
Back to my title point, learn to be present! be intentional in each moment to learn what God is trying to teach you. Let Him show you what needs to matter in your life. When we get past the negative self talk every time we mess up or drop the ball on something, it frees our minds to evaluate the true importance of things in our lives. There is a reason we tend to let certain things slide and it is usually an indicator of the direction God is trying to lead you in. If you take time each time you fail at something to remind yourself why you do the the thing in the first place, you will either remember a really good reason and be more motivated to do it better next time or you will come up blank and that right there is your sign that perhaps the season for that thing in your life has come to an end and it is time to walk away. It can be hard to walk away even when you make that call but remember that every time you walk away from something, you are walking towards the next good thing God has for you! How exciting is that!?
Blessings FAM!
What is one area that you tend to put things off? Why do you think you do that? Is your why for that thing no longer relevant to you? Can you even remember why you did it in the first place? Take some time to write out a list of all your commitments down the left side of a page in a notebook. Then go back and, next to each one, write your reason why you do that thing. Then go back a third time and prayerfully ask God if that why is still in season. It may be hard to accept what He tells you but this is the only way we can get true clarity in life. We must take time regularly to intentionally reflect and adjust our attention more towards the places where God is working and leading us. Only then can we truly be present.
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MM.004: Rhythms of Rest & Daily Sabbath
pause……
Take some time right now to just be. Put your phone away, turn off the TV and radio, Close your eyes, clear your mind and be still… Take a few slow and deep breaths to calm your spirit and then just listen…
Okay, be honest with yourself, when is the last time you made time for this kind of mental therapy? God commands us to practice sabbath in our lives like He did after He created the world. I think if even God is taking time to rest then it is pretty important that we do the same! More so, He invites us to make this a rhythm in our lives. Not just an every now and then occurrence but an actual steady rhythm, a habit, an integral part of our natural existence!
If you were a drummer for a band and you just sporadically hit the drums whenever you felt like it but didn’t actually keep time with a steady pace I think you would probably be kicked out of the band! A drummer that doesn’t keep time is useless, no offense to drummers. It can be hard to learn to keep steady rhythm, but with practice we can get better at it. In the same way we as Christians can be pretty useless examples for others when we only hit up God whenever we feel like we need it. It is not conducive to growing our character or proving our ability to be consistent or dependable. With practice we all can learn to be better at keeping a steady rhythm with God. We have to be intentional and put in effort to make it a habit in order to get in sync with Him and His will for our lives.
Most interpret sabbath as a command to engage with God once a week by setting aside one full day of rest and intentional focus. While this is good practice, and it is awesome if it is possible for you to do this each week, the reality is that sometimes it is not possible to block off an entire day every week and, if we are keeping with our drummer example, is it better to practice a little bit each day or only once a week? I don’t think God intended for us to only spend one day a week in His presence. The rule of sabbath being one day out of our week makes it seem like on the other six days we don’t need to take any rest or time to focus on God and that is simply not true! I need God every day and every hour of every day! I would be willing to bet you can say the same. It doesn’t make logical sense then that we would drudge through the whole week on our own and then only take time to rest and acknowledge Him one day out of seven!
Like in music, when the rhythm is more upbeat, we tend to get a bigger thrill out of it! Maybe there are some extra fills here and there that really excite our senses but even the base beat is frequent and exhilarating, it takes you someplace! I think sabbath in our lives should do the same thing. Make time for it as often as possible! I like to try and work in some sabbath hours or at least one sabbath hour each day. I am no where near perfect at it but the more I practice mindfulness and plan for it in my day, the better I get, and the better I get at it the more my relationship with God grows. I then feel inclined to make even more time for it, filling in the dull moments and keeping an increasingly frequent beat which exhilarates my life with His presence. He wants to take you somewhere! Meet Him in the intentional stillness of sabbath every chance you get and let Him guide your journey!
Blessings FAM!
How often do you pause and spend time with God, not just in standard prayer but in an extended intentional way like we do for sabbath? Maybe it is hard for you to block out an entire day from your week to focus solely on God. If that is the case, try each day this week to at least spend an hour in sabbath. Silently and with no distractions, just listen. That, I think, is what separates this from prayer. Both are important but sabbath rest, to me, means not gripping about life which, lets be honest, a lot of our prayers are like that. No, I think sabbath is more so a time to clear all distractions, be still, and just listen. The Holy Spirit will guide you in that time. Start by trying for an hour each day this week, morning works great but whenever it fits best for you, and then just let the beat grow from there!
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MM.003: One Bite At A Time
A popular dad joke you may have heard before is, How do you eat an elephant?….One bite at a time! This seems like such a simple concept yet it is so hard for us to apply to real world situations in our lives. Why is that? Okay so lets imagine eating an elephant was actually a thing you had to do. Obviously you wouldn’t look at it and tell yourself, “Well I can’t fit it all in my mouth at once so I may as well not try!” So why is it that we look at the dreams God has put in our hearts, see how big they are, and say to ourselves that they are too big to achieve all at once so let’s not even try!?
Every God size dream is going to appear to be too huge to accomplish! That is one way of knowing it is from Him! This dream I have had for Flow Angel Media is enormous and for the longest time I had no idea where to start or how to explain it to people. (I still have trouble explaining it, that won’t change any time soon! haha) In college I discovered an enjoyment for most any form of digital artistic expression from Photoshop to 3D printing to coding and web design. I felt overwhelmed by all the directions I was being inspired to walk in career wise and in the end I settled for complacency in IT.
If you know me, you may know that this wasn’t my dream. If you have kept up with me recently though, you may be starting to see, along with me, how I have began to realize just how much God has taught me through my journey thus far. Nothing is wasted! Even though it hasn’t yet looked the way I planned for it to at first, God knew that I needed to take this slower route through some tough things in order to learn things I didn’t know I would need to know! Even though I spent years not knowing where to bite the elephant of my calling first, I didn’t stop wondering, learning, and seeking guidance. In the mean time I have grown in so many ways which has prepared me to take this next step which I will reveal to you soon…keep reading.
Another thing about elephants that I have seen people use as an illustration which I love is the fact that, an average elephant’s gestation period is 18-22 months long. That is at least twice as long as a human’s and at most almost two and a half times as long. The common illustration talks about how when we know something, like the fact that we are pregnant or that God has promised us something unbelievably awesome will happen in and through our lives, people may not believe us because they see no progress. Their unbelief does not discount the truth you know. Some times we are not called to share certain parts of our calling right away because the unbelief of others can rub off on us and cause us to lose faith in it as well.
I have been challenged in this regard a lot lately in different areas of life. I have been growing in wisdom about when and with whom I should share the glimpses of my callings, big and small, in order to protect them in their vulnerable unformed state. My fundamental flaw is overthinking and then being so sure of myself that I talk up a storm and then either lose all desire to follow through or have things crumble in front of me and make me look like the fool I was for presuming to know how God would work things out.
In light of all of that, I do not share this lightly. Some close friends and family already know what has been going on because there are some that I crave advice and prayers from and whom I trust to support me and not bash down my excitement. I feel like it is official enough now to share publicly and it may not come as a major surprise but….as of 8/8/2020, Flow Angel Media, Inc is officially registered as a nonprofit! I submitted the paperwork on that day and received the confirmation that processing has been completed just this morning! It’s finally official!! As an added display of God’s perfect timing, I ordered 50 stickers of this elephant design to have and offer as a launch special product. My vendor had an amazing deal on them but they were not supposed to make it till the 24th. However, yesterday I got confirmation that they would be delivered today and they have! I cannot ignore God’s perfect timing in all of this!
It feels like I have finally birthed this long gestated dream out into the world and now I get to nurture it and watch it grow! I am so excited for this new journey and cannot wait to see what God does through it all!
Blessings FAM!
p.s. Keep an eye out for the elephant stickers to hit my shop! I’ll have a special launch deal on them for a bit to celebrate the establishment of FAM, Inc!
What is a dream you have felt called to by God? What is holding you back from taking steps towards that dream? Do not let the unbelief of others discount your internal conviction to chase after it! God speaks directly to us and others are on their own journeys, they cannot always see the progress God is making inside of you. I pray for your wisdom to know when and to whom you should share your dreams with and for the boldness to work towards them each day regardless of external forces of encouragement or a lack there of. I hope that God brings your people around you, like He has for me, to believe with you in prayer for the realization of your calling.
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MM.002: Failure is life’s best classroom
I was home schooled in grade school so my first public school experience was college. When I first started out I remember being terrified that everyone was going to be so much smarter than me. hahaha yeah…that wasn’t true! I realized real quick that we were all just the same; nervous, ignorant, and confused about where our classrooms were on top of worrying whether we chose the right major or not. I would say, after that first day, my fears of being the dumbest person in the room quickly vanished. My first semester was spent doing all the core subjects that just feel like an extension of high school anyway so I like to think of those few months as my high school experience. My mom drove me to class most days as well due to our shared car situation and the fact that I didn’t even get my license till about a month into college.
At the risk of sounding prideful, to me college wasn’t all that difficult as far as course load was concerned. I got straight A’s my entire college career and graduated Summa Cum Laude. Honestly, I am almost upset that I didn’t fail a course or at least get a lower final mark somewhere along the way. That may sound odd to you but I think I would have learned so much more in my college days about life, had I experienced a bit more failure and disappointments during that season. I am not saying I was perfect and never failed personally at all during that time, but as far as the world was concerned from the outside, I had it all together with a job and perfect scores in all my classes so I was doing alright for myself! It made it easy to hide the lessons my private failures were teaching me and to choose to ignore the implications they should have had on my daily behavior. I had no accountability and therefore no outside pressure to correct myself.
I did, however, put a lot of internal pressure on myself to maintain good grades and never let people see how overwhelmed I could get. I didn’t want to ever be a burden to anyone. I wanted to be the self-sufficient one everyone could trust and depend on, not the one that always needed help. Looking back, that was my big failure in that season. Had I opened myself up to some true accountability then, maybe I would not have as many stress induced grey hairs as I do now! haha and maybe life would have grown in a slightly different direction by reaching towards a community of genuine accountability earlier on. I say genuine because it is not like I didn’t think I had a community that would care enough to correct me lovingly through life. That is another mistake I made, by choosing comfortable and going with the flow most of my early life, I fooled myself into thinking certain relationships were more meaningful than they obviously were. I was blind to how alone I was and privileged to not have any true discomfort in life to help me realize the void until much later than I would like to admit.
As a fan of a particular British time travel sci-fi show, I understand the implications of changing the past and therefore would not wish to change my story in any way since without things happening exactly how they did, I would not be exactly who I am today. Failures are the best way to learn. Arguably, they are the only way we learn since even as kids it seems we have to touch the hot stove (or in my case, a car cigarette lighter) before we believe that it’ll actually burn us. Some of us…more than once! In order to change our behavior and work towards better results, we have to sit in the classroom of our failures. We must study and reflect back on the things we have done or the things we have believed that were wrong, accept that we are imperfect and give grace to ourselves to try again. If we ignore our mistakes and hide them from everyone, we have no outer force pressuring us to correct ourselves. However, the internal anguish remains, whether we acknowledge it or not. It is this dissonance of knowing the discipline we need and denying ourselves of it that causes such anxiety and depression to rule our lives.
The lesson I learned by sitting in this classroom today is this: Find your genuine community and do not hide away your failures from them. Let them see all of you so they can lovingly correct you and hold you accountable to the things you already know you need to change in your life or better yet, the things you are too blind to see in yourself! The bible says in Proverbs 27:17, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” We cannot sharpen ourselves and in order to sharpen each other, we must be in close community together. Knives have to rub up against each other in order to shave away the rough edges. It will be hard and probably painful at times, but that is what we are called to do in Godly community! In the end we will all benefit by being more effective versions of the people God made us to be.
Blessings FAM!
Who do you have in your life to hold you accountable? Who do you hold accountability for? If it is hard to think of answers to these two questions, do you truly have genuine Godly community? If not, find it! Surrounding yourself with genuine community is like fertilizer for your soul! It helps you grow! If you do know that you are surrounded by a good Godly community then thank God for them! There is no sweeter gift than the friendship of those who love you enough to call you out when you need it and graciously tell it like it is!
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MM.001: Do What You Can & Let God Do The Rest!
I like to break things down and think about the significance of each word in a phrase like this. It can sound cliche or oversimplified on it’s own. When you stop and dig into what each word is really talking about, you gain context for a richer meaning behind the phrase as a whole. So lets expound on that sentence.
“Do” – Do not just sit around and wait for life to happen. God’s promises only come after an action of obedience to His plan.
“what” – Know what you are being called to do. The only way we can know this is by being familiar enough with God and His will to recognize His voice so we can hear what He is calling us towards.
“you” – Do not worry about what God is calling other people to, you are not responsible for them. You can only control yourself and what you do!
“can” – We all have different gifts and it helps to be honest with ourselves about what we are truly good at. Not everyone can do everything. Find your thing and own it!
“&” – Once you have done your part, that is not the end. Let’s be honest, It would all turn out pretty crappy every time if that were true. Be expectant for God to show up and fill in the blanks. Pray for it, wait for it, look for Him at work in everything!
“let” – You may find Him at work doing things in your life that are uncomfortable, scary, or just overwhelming. Be still and wait. Let Him finish His work and you will see His plan shine through even the darkest of circumstances! He uses the hard things to grow us the most. Be patient, growth takes time.
“God” – Remember who He is and His love for you! He is in control and His plan is for our good.
“do” – He is powerful and able to do immeasurably more than we could ever ask or imagine.
“the” – He knows exactly what needs to be done in every circumstance. We may not understand it from our point of view but He sees the bigger picture and knows what is best for us.
“rest!” – He will not stop until His good work is finished. He began a good work in each of us and will always see it through to the end.
When we do our part and wait expectantly for God to show up, He will show off! He works all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Rest today and everyday knowing that our best is good enough and God completes the work He calls us to when we obey and step out in faith!
Pray right now for God to make it clear to you this week, exactly what it is He is calling you to accomplish. It may not seem like much but even the smallest things we feel called to do are an important part of His bigger picture. On the other hand, it may be something that seems huge! Just remember how much bigger your God is! Nothing is too big for Him to help you through. If you seek His will and Pray for Him to guide you, you will know what He is truly calling you to do. Once you know it, do it! Then sit back and watch how He uses it to grow you and advance His kingdom!
Blessings FAM!
