timely lessons

It takes courage to move forward.

That courage fails me more than it finds me of late…it’s much easier to talk myself out of writing a post than to it is to begin one.

The excuses are numerous…

• The kids are home for summer vacation
• There’s not enough time to write and finesse a post
• I have an idea for post but do not have immediate access to the technology to write said post
• There’s swim lessons, baseball practice, errands, exercising and choreschoreschores

But what’s really at the root of it all is a fear that I will pour myself out for nothing. That investing all.this.time. that competes for so many worthy things is really just a waste of time because it will lead nowhere. I fear sacrificing time with my family, time with others, time on tasks that must be done for something that I’ll look back on years down the road and regret having ever started. I fear wasting time.

And so a month slips by.

And yet…

And yet, I must write. To do otherwise would be burying the very thing I know my Lord entrusted to me.

With this post, I bravely step out of the boat, and trust Him with the very thing I fear.

That’s not the only lesson learned in this month of silence:

1. “Hiring” my children as prep cooks saves me time. I often hesitate to involve them because it takes time to explain and oversee and deal with meltdowns, complaints and extra messes which are reality of kids in the kitchen. Then, on a day when I was preparing a soup recipe that usually takes 30 minutes of prep work, I assigned each of them a task and, praise the Lord, reduced the amount of time it took me to make the soup. Bonus: We were spending time together instead of apart and they were learning.

2. It’s hard to save time and money at the same time. One of the tasks pulling me away from writing is trying to be better about budgeting, monitoring our spending and trying to save money on groceries. It’s taking a lot of time to learn new habits, put new systems in place and then keep up with some of these money saving activities. I’m hoping to share what I’m learning in future posts as part of the Project: Pare series.

3. It’s hard to find coffee pots in hotel rooms. When we went on vacation last month, I had hoped experiment with using the expected in-room coffee pot to make my breakfast. Only one out of the five hotels we stayed in had a traditional coffee pot. So for the remaining four hotels I had to draw on a lesson previously learned from completely changing the way I eat and experiment with a different way of preparing breakfast. In the process I discovered that soaked buckwheat and millet (my breakfast of choice) has a pleasant crunch.