I know that I am called to live a simple life and I know the condition my heart needs to be in to achieve simple living. Day 2 I looked at actually defining how to live a simple life.
So today I want to write about what it looks like.
If you hear only one thing from this post, understand that you do NOT have to move out to a farm, raise you own food and sew your own clothes in order to live a simple life!! You can achieve simplicity in the city, suburb or in the country. It is not about where you live as much as it is about how you live.
So my goals are to spend my days
being content,
loving,
working with my hands,
minding my own business,
and responding in ways that are not dramatic, but easy to understand.
What does it LOOK like for us?
My family and I get up early.
**We get up early for many reasons. From Jesus setting the example of rising early, to the Proverbs 31 woman, early rising is mentioned favorably in the Bible. I have found that if we are up and working together early our evening takes on less drama. Probably because we are all ready to plop into bed!! :) For me personally, this falls under the goal of working with my hands. I am most productive in the hours before lunch. And, many times this is the only time I can slip away in the quiet and spend time with the Lord.
We try to work very hard and remember the Sabbath.
**Teaching good work ethic when children are young is very important. My girls began chores around the age of two. Do they always love doing chores? Nope!! But chores are beneficial to them and it teaches them to work without grumbling or complaining. They not only learn the importance of hard work, but it keeps them out of others' business.
Another important thing regarding work is to observe the Sabbath. We need the day of rest that the Lord put into our schedule!!
Serve others.
**For us this takes different forms. My daughters do volunteer work for different organizations. As a family we serve in the mission field together for two weeks in the summer. My husband began a new tradition for us a while back that whenever we travel as a family, we find someplace to serve in that area. Sometimes it is at a soup kitchen, clothes closet, or a church.
It is easy for us to get caught up serving those in the community and forget to serve our own family members! So we really encourage serving each other. When someone asks for a favor within our family, we try to let our answer be yes as often as possible.
Get outside frequently!
**I can think of few things that inspire contentedness and love more than seeing the sun rise or set, or watching the flowers blow in the fields! Even just sitting in your backyard listening to birds sing. God's presence is so prevalent in the world around us. He makes it easy to fall in love with each day if we will just slow down and take the time to notice His love notes.
Limit screen time
**I don't know about you guys, but I have enough worldly influence in my life without adding three hours of television each day to it! Just the commercials make me blush!!
This also includes computer time. I am the first to admit that things like facebook, Skype, etc. have brought many people closer together. You can reconnect with friends from years past and keep up with those that have moved away, but be careful my friend!! Spending hours playing games on the computer or even "researching" on the computer is taking away time to work with our hands and with others.
I get caught up in too much computer time and it falls under the guise of "research." I hear about a new way to organize things, decorate things, teach things, etc. and I go spend HOURS learning about it, finding out where I can get it, and so on.
Guess what? There is a time and a place for that, but it is not as often as I do it. Nope, I would say that is another sign of my struggle with discontentedness (I don't think this is a word, but I'm going with it!!)!
Spend time with the Lord
**There is no way to live a truly simple life without communicating with your chief planner every day. There have been stages in my life that this time was while I was nursing little ones. I went through one time, where I spent the entire time on my knees, because otherwise I would fall asleep!
This time does not have to be perfect, it just needs to BE. I said earlier that the one thing I wanted you to take away from this was that you can live anywhere and still have a simple life....skip that! If you take anything away from what I am writing today, let it be that the key to a simple life...the key to a joyful life...the key to a peaceful life...is to start it with Him.
Are we the perfect, simple family? Uhhhh....NO WAY!! Not even close :) I would say that, for the most part, our drama and complications seem to outnumber our simple, but we are striving!
I am excited to share with you tomorrow a way that we applied our simple living guidelines to help our children solve a dispute!! I was praying through the situation as it happened and it was amazing to see the Lord work!
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