writing
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day 20: purposeful housekeeping.
Last week I wrote about finding purposeful simplicity in your home. I’m convinced that one of the biggest keys to being content with your home is keeping it clean. Now by clean I don’t mean impeccably dusted baseboards or sparkling windows (neither of which I have); I just mean a home that’s clean enough for you to rest in. The best trick I know for keeping a consistently “clean enough” home has been learning utilize the little pockets of time in my day. I try to snatch that 10 or 15 minutes here and there and get one thing done: unload the dishwasher, put laundry away, clear off the dining…
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day 19: today.
Today Purposeful Simplicity was sitting outside with a cup of tea and the latest Mitford book instead of checking Pinterest.
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day 18: it doesn’t have to be perfect.
If you’re struggling with contentment in your home or just want some inspiration, I can’t recommend The Nesting Place highly enough. I’ve read the book twice, and every friend who’s read it says it’s made them more happy with their home. Myquillyn Smith shares her story of learning creativity and contentment with the houses God has given her with honest and humor, and all the photos of her home interior were taken in a rental house! You can check it out of the library, but it’s pretty enough to buy and keep on your coffee table.
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day 17: a letter to baby #3.
Dear sweet baby, Today we got approved for adoption; we’re now officially a Waiting Family. You have no idea what this means to me. You’ve been in my heart for such a long time. Did you know that we tried to start the adoption process to meet you when Judah was just a year old? But God closed the door then, and He gave us sweet Amelie. Then we moved to another country and we thought surely you would be waiting for us there. Once again, God’s answer was, “No.” We had to move back home and my heart was so sad. I was really sick. I missed the place…
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day 16: a home you want to spend time in.
I believe a life of Purposeful Simplicity and enjoying your house go hand in hand and here’s why: Part of simplifying your life is learning to be at peace with being at home. Now before you write me off saying, “Well easy for you, you’re a home schooling stay-at-home mom,” just bear with me for a second. Even if you work 60 hours a week or drive kids to and from school, I still believe home can and should be a place of rest. I believe a simple life is one in which we grab pre-made food and make Target runs less and spend a smaller percentage of our day…
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day 15: take a deep breath.
We’re half way through October and through the 31 Days Writing Challenge! Shall we take a deep breath? Thanks for being here with me this month. I spent the first half of the month talking about my process of finding Purposeful Simplicity: peeling back the layers, identifying the outside and the inside noise, remembering my identity, resting in who I am, not in what I do. For the rest of this month, I’ll be really practical. I’ll talk about different areas of life and home that I’m trying to make Purposefully Simple. Click here for the first post in this series. Happy mid-October!
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day 14: godly grief.
For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas wordly grief produces death. – II Corinthians 7.10 I’ve talked thus far about what gets in the way of purposeful simplicity: outside noise and inside noise. Now . . . what to do with all this junk I’m facing as I realize just how noisy my life is? Until I read the verse above it never occurred to me that I have a choice between the kinds of grief I feel: there’s godly grief (or sorrow), which as the apostle Paul says, produces repentance and leads to salvation without regret. This is the good kind of sorrow.…
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day 13: church noise.
photo source I want to talk about one more layer of noise that keeps us from a life of purposeful simplicity, and it’s church noise. Christians have come to live lives that look very similar to that of everyone else, caught up in this vortex of busyness: we work, we go to school or home school, we do extra-curricular activities, we do outreach, we go to church events. We go, go, go and do, do do, our lives are filled-to-bursting with all this racing around. We’re so scared of missing out on something that we say “yes” to everything. We put our kids in all kinds of activities so they’ll…
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day 12: home study.
If you’re new here, welcome to our blog and to 31 Days of Purposeful Simplicity! You can click on the graphic in our sidebar for the full list of posts in this series. I use Sundays this month for family updates. And so now, the home study. We finished our home study this past week. Due to short-staffing issues in our adoption agency office, we waited three months for our home study, but once we got started, we rolled! We squeezed all four appointments into just over a week. The home study process consists of an initial home visit, individual interviews with David and me at the office, then a…
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day 11: only in the gospel.
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