This week explores the letter A through animals, Andy Warhol, aluminum foil, and more. You’ll also find the weekly book list, poems, and art projects.
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Introducing: The Home Preschool Series
If you are currently spending your days with a child between the ages of two and four, I’m excited to share a collection of resources that I have gathered and created for learning together. This week I’ll be sharing the first week in a series of plans for home preschool that include book lists, poetry, art projects, memory verses and more. If you don’t need the plans in their entirety, there still might be some useful odds and ends there for you and your little one. I initially put this post out there excited about sharing something I’ve worked very hard on. And that is true. But it’s also true…
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9 Simple Practices to Anchor and Quiet Your Soul
I recently published a series about identifying the challenges that get in the way of quieting our souls. And so I wanted to follow that up with some practical ways that I’ve been learning to commune with God in the everyday. There is something sacred about quiet time in the traditional sense, however in some seasons of life, quiet moments grow less frequent than we’d like and we need practices that remind us to invite God to be with us in the chaos. The following practices have been helpful for me in that: 1. A Daily Centering Prayer There is something significant about making space to listen to the truths…
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Galatians 5:22-23 | A Memory Verse
“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” —Galatians 5:22-23 I’m “behind” on our monthly verse series. I like to share a new verse here each month to meditate on and memorize together, but I’ve not been quite ready to move past the fruits of the Spirit. This passage has really been speaking to my heart in this season and it’s also wonderfully applicable for little hearts and minds. There were a few months of this toddler season that were leaving me rather exasperated. I read the books and tried the tactics, but listening remained a struggle. All the little things felt…
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Creating a Daily Centering Prayer
I’ve found myself revisiting and relearning old truths about who I am and who God is and what this means for how I ought to spend my days. And this can be such a source of frustration for me at times, because while I understand that learning involves mistakes, I don’t like to repeat the same ones. I long for new truths, for bursting growth above ground, but God seems to keep drawing my attention back to my roots. I want to learn efficiently, but God gently guides me toward the slow and steady. I detect the not so subtle ways that our consumer driven, productivity obsessed culture is shaping…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of the Heart
So often when I set out to cultivate space for quiet and recentering I’ve entered into it with my heart chasing after the wrong things. I find myself viewing daily devotional time with a star chart sort of mentality, rather than an earnest desire to be shaped and transformed by God. I set out focused mostly on what I’m doing and how consistent I’m being. But if I am coming to my quiet time with a desire to prove my value and goodness, then I’m not fully understanding what this is about. We have so many other systems of earning and proving ourselves in our lives, that it’s become a habitual way…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Distractions
The world has grown wildly distracted over the last decade. Though not a particularly profound observation, it is an important one because our increasingly distracted existence had all sorts of implications for our overall wellbeing. However of particular concern is the way it is the way it is diminishing our spirituality. So many of us are struggling with desperation for meaning and purpose because our energy and attention is unnecessarily scattered. When we permit distractions to become the guiding force in our lives, we surrender to a reactive life. A life that is composed of one miscellaneous decision/action after another. A distracted life needs the anchor of quiet moments to…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Perfectionism
Quiet moments can become a struggle for me when I allow myself to become preoccupied with doing it the ”right way”. When perfectionism gets in the way of regularly practicing quiet, I am refusing to experience God as an integral part of my days. I’m limiting those quiet moments for recentering to a very particular context and compartment of my life. My sight becomes narrow. If it’s not going to be Bible pages by candlelight, then should I really even bother? It sounds like nonsense because it is, and yet I’ve made that choice many days. And when I do, I’m severely underestimating God’s ability and desire to meet me…
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Quiet Moments: The Challenge of Time
My heart has longed for many years to be more disciplined about carving out consistent spaces in my life for quiet. I’ve sometimes thought it was because I wasn’t putting forth enough effort. I believed that I simply needed to try harder. But when I asked why I was failing and why it was so hard for me, I began to notice some thought patterns that kept preventing or interrupting the daily practice of quiet moments. The first one being the belief that I don’t have the time. Quiet time has often been delayed or deleted from my days when I perceive that time is scarce. What I’ve come to…
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The Importance of Quiet Moments
All my life I had heard of how God wanted to be first in my life. And then I vividly remember a moment sitting in a college class listening to a religion professor give a lecture about how God’s desire was not to be our first priority. I remember a generic list of priorities appearing squeakily across the dry erase board. “God” filled the number one slot and the professor squeaked a line straight through it and proceeded to draw a circle around the list of priorities and told us that that was how God wanted to participate in our lives—not by being first, but by being everything. God’s desire is to consume our…
