Day 4 - Real Life :: Having a Band-aid Party or Bribing Your Kids to Get a Shot

Today my kids are getting their flu shots at school.  They are not crazy about shots and they are not happy that I am making them get them done at school.  I tried to explain to them that the point of the flu shot is to help prevent them from getting the flu.  I told them about how terrible it is, and that they would be really sick for quite a few days.  I pointed out that the quick pinch of a shot is a lot less painful than days of body aches, chills, and nausea.  They still didn't want the shot.  So I gave up on the practical wisdom of the benefits of the flu-shot, and instead told them that we are having a band-aid party when they get home.

I told them that I am going to go to Walgreens today and get myself a flu shot, and then I am going to stock up on a bunch of boxes of band-aids.  When everyone gets home, we are going to make popcorn, plaster ourselves with a bunch of band-aids all over,pop some popcorn, and watch a movie.  They were THRILLED when I told them this idea.  Charlotte told me she couldn't wait to get her shot so that she could come home and have a band-aid party with me.  Rory, the one that was the most defiant about getting the shot, told me that she was excited to have the band-aid party too.  I said " well, no, you can't have the party with us, because you already told me you aren't getting a flu shot".  "Well maybe I will" she mumbled.  Success.

Day 3 - How God Uses Waiting - Part 1

How God Uses Waiting - Part 1

"Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!" Psalm 27:14

God has a plan for every part of your life, and He is in control of the big and the small.  When things aren't going according to our plan, to our timetable, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture.  It puts us at a crossroads where we can choose to walk away from truth and try to accomplish things on our own strength, or we can choose to trust.  

Abraham was told that he would be a father of nations, but he was unsure how this could be because Sarah was barren.  So Sarah and Abraham devised a plan that Abraham would father a child through one of Sarah's servants, Hagar.  However, this resulted in enmity between Sarah and Hagar, and Hagar and her child lost and dying in a desert.  This was not the plan that God had in mind, and this was not the child that God was going to establish His covenant with.  If Abraham and Sarah had not taken matters into their own hands, and instead waited upon the Lord, things would have turned out a lot differently.

Waiting has purpose.  If we choose to trust Him, we will experience so much joy, even in the hard waiting season.  We will experience intimacy with Christ that can only be experienced through true surrender.  This means that we let go of what we are waiting for, longing for, and instead place it in His capable hands.  By saying to God " I choose you over my hopes and dreams" we enter into a place of closeness and even freedom.  We don't have to control the outcome.  We don't have to make sure all the pieces fit or the stars align.  All we have to do is trust that the Creator of the universe has a plan for our life, and walk the road that He has shown us.  And as we walk, He walks with us.  We don't have to go through our waiting season alone.  He is right there beside us.  We can experience the joy of knowing Christ intimately and see how He blesses us even when life is so hard.  He does want to bless us.  He wants us to know the joy that comes through trusting in Him alone, and He wants us to experience the freedom that comes from surrender and intimacy with Him.  Sometimes the answer to our prayer doesn't look like what we had hoped for or expected it, but it is so much better when it is from the Lord and not our own striving.

"And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail." Isaiah 58:11

Day 2 - Introduction to The Waiting Season

Over the next thirty days, I am going to blog every day - a little bit of everything, but one of the things that I really want to do is finish my book.  I am not sure how great it will come out, but I will feel a lot better having finished it.  

-the waiting season-

::encouragement and hope for when time seems to stand still::

Introduction.


"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven..." Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8
There is a time for every matter under heaven, but what about when it feels like that time will never come?  When it feels like the season we are in will last forever and we are stuck in a holding pattern, unsure of the next move?  Is there even anywhere to go from here?  What do we do when all we can do is wait?

Waiting is hard.  It oftentimes feels so passive, and it is beyond our control.  It feels like there is nothing for us to do but wait for the clock to turn, the letter to come, the phone to ring, the day to finally arrive.  In the meantime, we ask ourselves what is the purpose in this?  What is the point of waiting?   Why can't I have that house/car/baby that I have been dreaming of for so long?  Why is God allowing me to unemployed for this amount of time?  Why do I have to just sit and watch and wait, while others seem to "have it all"?

People (myself included) often think that when they get that house, have that baby, start the new job, own their own successful business - THAT is when their lives will begin.  However, it is during the waiting - the in-between - where life happens.  This is where growth takes place and this is what God uses to make us who we are meant to be.  The waiting season looks different for everyone, and I hope this book helps us to explore how God uses waiting to grow us in our relationship with Him and how it helps us become more like Christ.

I wrote this book for me as much as I did for you.  The idea was born in a hard season of waiting in my personal life.  As I write this, I am still in that place and trying to keep my eyes on Jesus rather than my circumstances.  This is no easy task, but perhaps if we dig a little deeper, we can find that God has great purpose for our waiting seasons.  I want this book to be a source of encouragement and hope when you are questioning God's plan for your life.  I hope that this book is a tool to point you back to who Jesus is and what He has already done for us to remind you that He can be trusted with your life.

Day 1 - The project begins...

And so we begin my Happiness Project.  Sometimes it seems like a huge undertaking, and I question the purpose of it, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time, so I think I am going to push forward.  I will take it a month at a time and go from there.  If nothing else, I will have tried, and that is something.  So November is National Writer's Month, and one area that I have been wanting to focus on is writing.  I thought it would make me happy to finish my book and to practice my writing skills by blogging.  I also think it would make me happy to make others happy, so I thought I would write some notes of encouragement.  Lastly, I want to ignore the numbers - page views, followers, words on the page.  I just want to have fun with it and see where it goes!


NOVEMBER - [ tell your story ] writing
resolutions:
1- practice writing (blog every day in the month of November)
2- work on my book
3- send weekly notes of encouragement
4- ignore the numbers

Okay, so far so good! Only 29 more days to go!

my focus areas

I finally decided on the areas I wanted to focus on and ended up coming up with all eleven. I figured if I was going to do this, I would do it right.  Deciding what order to do them was the hardest part because they all seemed important, and something I should start working on right now.  In the end, I decided some with a purpose behind it, and some just arbitrarily.  Here are my eleven areas:

NOVEMBER: Tell your story - Writing

DECEMBER: Spread Joy - Parenthood

JANUARY: Study the Word - Spiritual Growth

FEBRUARY:  The greatest of these is love - Marriage

MARCH:  Be kind - Humanity

APRIL: Outside the Comfort zone - Challenging Myself

MAY: Boost Energy - Vitality

JUNE: Pay attention - Mindfulness

JULY: You learn something new every day - Intellectual Growth

AUGUST:  Keep a Contented Heart - Gratitude

SEPTEMBER: Cultivate Relationships - Friendship

OCTOBER: Bootcamp Perfect - Happiness


 Looking at all the areas, and thinking about doing it for a whole year seems really daunting of a task, and maybe I am crazy to think about doing this, but I really feel like I have to at least try.  Not trying at all would be worse for me than attempting it and realizing I won't be able to see it through.

I still have to finish coming up with my resolutions and make up my charts, and then I will be ready to begin!

my personal commandments

In preparation for starting my Happiness Project, I came up with my own Personal Commandments.  Gretchen came up with her own when she pulled out the overarching principles of her resolutions.  I borrowed some of hers but mostly added my own
.
My Personal Commandments
1. Be Meghan.
2. Give grace.
3. Identify the problem.
4. Stop caring about what other people think.
5. Fail small, not big.
6. React accordingly to the size of the problem.
7. Let it go.
8. Savor your season.
9. Act the way I want to feel.
10. Always start with a list.
11. God is always bigger.
12. Remember Whose you are.

Now that I had come up with these, it was time to nail down the areas that I wanted to focus on.  I had already come up with nine, but were there any more?  And what resolutions did I want to come up with to help me in these areas?

"It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible." - Samuel Johnson

I needed to break down these larger focus areas into smaller, more manageable resolutions if I was ever going to succeed at my project.

a new project

Goodness I love projects.  I love when a new idea comes, I love thinking about how to execute it, and I love starting them.  I don't always finish them however.  I realized this about myself and I also learned a few other things as well.  I just got done reading Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin and I learned a lot.  I highly suggest you read it for two reasons.  1- It's good.  2- I am going to mention some of her "lingo" here and probably won't spell it all out.  So it will be helpful if you want to follow along.

So I learned that I am an Upholder, and that I follow rules are are expected of me (such as the speed limit) as well as rules that I place on myself (such as exercising 5x a week).  It is this realization that helped me start getting up earlier.  I have always wanted to, but have always told myself that I was not a morning person so I just couldn't get out of bed.  After reading this book however, I decided that I could get up earlier if that is what I really wanted to do, so I did.  After all, I set the expectation on myself, and now I carry it out.

Another thing I learned is what I mentioned before.  I am not a Finisher.  I always suspected this to be the case, but it helped to name it, you know?  That means that I don't always finish every book I start (such as the five on my nightstand that I mentioned a few posts back).  I have started writing a book and didn't get past the introduction.  I began my cake business but then I abandoned it.  I have had very good reasons for all of the above, but I also think it is just in my nature that I don't always finish what I start.  I am not sure if I like this quality about myself, but I have also learned that in order to succeed, I need to work within my nature, not against it.

Okay back to the project.  Gretchen Rubin also wrote a book called The Happiness Project, and to me this was GOLD.  I loved everything about it.  I loved the idea of focusing on areas in my life that I wanted to improve, and breaking them down into smaller resolutions that, when followed, could contribute to a greater sense of happiness because I am growing in areas that I want to grow.  She did hers over a course of a year - she chose eleven areas she wanted to focus on and focused on a new one each month.  January was Vitality for example, and then when she started on her February focus (marriage), she also continued along with January's as well and so on.  December was the month she tried to do all the areas at once, a "Perfect Bootcamp".  Now this was years ago, and many have hopped on the Happiness Project bandwagon and I am very late to the party.  As a matter of fact, the Happiness Toolbox that she had developed to aid others on their own projects shut down about three years ago.  As I said, I am late.  I did see that a lot of people wanted to try theirs for a month or whatever, and I wonder if anyone tried to do a whole year like she did.

Well I decided that I was going to try my own project, and I was going to attempt to do the full year.  When I wrote out my areas however, I only came up with nine, and I think I will start there.  I am worried about my inability to be a Finisher, but I am still going to try.  If nothing else, it allowed me to look at the areas that I wanted to improve in my life and develop some helpful resolutions to aid me in this quest.

I am a perfectionist and I really loved the idea of starting in January and going from there, but I am also really excited about it, and the idea of waiting two months just to start wasn't going to work for me.  After all, part of her inclination to even start the project was because she wanted to prepare for - adversity - to develop the self-discipline and the mental habits to deal with a bad thing when it happened.  "The time to start exercising, stop nagging, and organize our digital photos was when everything was going smoothly.  I didn't want to wait for a crisis to remake my life."  I totally agree.  So I am going to start this in November, and go from there.  She did a LOT of research before she started, but I am not sure that I want to spend as much time preparing.  Especially because she did a lot of the legwork for me, and I am planning on modeling mine after hers in quite a few areas.

I feel a lot of guilt about not finishing things that I start, but I have found that most of the time I experience the guilt when I have told other people about my idea and then do not complete it.  For this reason, I may not share this project with others right away, except for my husband.  Or perhaps I will share it, but with the full disclaimer that I have no idea where this will go, but that I want to try.

I am going to spend the rest of the week preparing for the project, and coming up with my resolutions and then I will go ahead and begin in November!