Another addiction in my life is performance. I see how this goes hand-in-hand with pleasing people, but this one is about pleasing God. I believe I was saved by grace, I really do. I believe God loves me unconditionally. But I also need to live right. I need to follow him and do good works and live a life of service and sacrifice. Otherwise I’m failing the God who made me and saved me. This idol is tricky because yes, as a Christian I should do good things. That’s not where the problem lies. The problem has to do with why I do these things, and my motivation is so…

I’ve found a way to use media to inspire me toward a life of purposeful simplicity, and that’s by listening to podcasts. I’ve never enjoyed audio books because I’m a visual learner and need to see the words to get inside a story. But somehow podcasts are different because most of the ones I listen to are conversations. If you think about it, social media and TV, while fun and entertaining, seem to always provide us with life examples we shouldn’t follow – whether it’s advertising or celebrity drama or poor choices made by our favorite TV characters. I think that’s okay in small doses. But the podcasts I’ve found…

I’m  reading an excellent book called Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, by Dr. Leonard Sax. He says that one of the factors in this epidemic is the effect video game addiction has both on young boys and adult men in our generation. You’d expect a chapter like this to talk mostly about the violence that’s in many popular video games, and it does touch on it. But here’s what Dr. Sax says is the main danger in excessive video game use: the influence for young men to disengage from reality. Boys who grow up playing hours and hours of…

On Friday I shared an example of how a good thing in my life turned bad without a defined purpose. Here’s the process of how I began to find my bearings and quiet the noise of purposeless busyness. It helped to start by listing the non-negotiables: God. David. My kids. That was simple enough. The other parts of my life are where things got murky, but I just starting listing them too. I realized that my children’s education is absolutely a priority for the next 13+ years. I don’t have to homeschool, but I want to. David and I have decided together that it’s what’s best for our family right…

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One of the biggest passions of our church plant is growing relationships. We don’t have many programs because we want our people to pursue honest, meaningful relationships with their family, their church, their coworkers, and their neighbors. We want to create margins in our weekly schedule for time with people. Knowing this when we started gathering our core group two years ago, I threw myself head-long into friendships and meeting neighbors. I wanted an open-door policy in our home. I wanted people to come to me any time they were struggling or needed to talk or just wanted to sit and laugh. I wanted us to cook and eat meals…

photo source In order to discover how to live a life of purposeful simplicity I need to peel back the layers. And I’ve come to think of the layers as “noise;” both noise that comes from outside me and noise that’s in my own heart. The old me felt that noise and responded with frustration, helplessness, and blaming people or situations around me. The new me has begun to identify early signs of this rising frustration and ask myself the question, “What’s the specific noise that’s getting in the way of a peaceful heart right now? What’s keeping me from being at rest?” One of the biggest ways noise seeps…

As I thought about what I want to write this month, the common thread that wove its way through my ideas was Purposeful Simplicity. Because this is where I am right now. This phrase expresses what God’s teaching me this year in different areas of my life, bringing it all together into one whole. I use the word “Purposeful” because I love the idea of simplicity but don’t think it in and of itself is enough. Simplicity is a popular word these days, and I think it can be a wonderful goal or also an unhealthy obsession. I can work and work toward a simple home and a simple life…