Routines are hard to keep up with sometimes. I feel like they form in unknown ways too. I have a routine of getting up, making coffee, and writing my morning prayers in my journal. For a while, I would do this in bed, but that made it hard to concentrate and CJ always wanted pets which made it impossible to write. I started doing my prayers at the kitchen table instead, and now it’s just part of the routine. It wasn’t planned, but now it would feel weird if I didn’t do it at the table.
Then there are the routines that once you get out of are hard to get back into. Healthy eating and working out is a good example.
Recently, we spent a week at the beach, which was awesome. Even if we did work for most of it; working with a view of the ocean is not bad at all. However, now that we’ve been home for a couple of weeks, it’s been hard to stay energized and motivated. Especially that first week back. Work felt more draining than normal, our workouts felt weaker, and we ate dessert every day that week.
By now we have finally made it back to our normal routines. Climbing every other day, working out each day, feeling stronger, working on projects, all the normal things. Except one.
Dessert.
It is so much more fun to eat junk food than it is to eat healthy food. My body would disagree, which is probably why it gives me headaches, stomach aches, and zero energy when I eat poorly, but it is still fun! This makes it harder to get back into the routine of eating healthy.
Here we are, though. Trying to build our routine back, and I suppose that’s all one can do. We have a lot we’d love to spend time on, lots of dreams, and it’s hard to work on everything all at once.
It would be a ton of fun to succeed in a furniture flipping business, Taylor wants to get really good at photography, I’d love to sell books, and Taylor is also starting to finish her appraisal license. On top of all that, we’re starting to pray about where God wants us to move and when. Right now we have our heart set on Asheville and are hoping it might be possible in 2022.
One thing we are going to try is just picking one project and any free time we have, we are going to devote to that until it’s finished. Hopefully, this will give us more motivation and cross more projects off the list. We’ll see how that goes.
All that to say, building routines is hard sometimes. I started wondering where the idea of a routine came from. I suppose we can look to God for it. He worked for 6 days and rested for 1. He told us to do the same thing. That’s a weekly routine right there. What we do during those 6 days is work; there are no specific routines within and maybe that’s the point. We just get the broad term: work. I talked about that last week. It makes me think, though, that maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time worrying about every single hour of the day being planned out. Perhaps if we took more time to let God work in our lives, we’d be surprised at what we find.
The thing I do know is that the day of rest, day 7, is super important. Of course, the Pharisees would have us believe we must literally do nothing for an entire 24 hour day on the 7th day of the week, or else we’re breaking God’s law.
They missed the whole point as Jesus points out to them. We need rest in the Lord. It’s not a strict rule to follow to stay in God’s good graces. God didn’t rest because He needed it. God didn’t command us to rest because He needs time with us. He desires time with us, yes, but He doesn’t need it. To say so would be to say God lacks something, which He does not.
The ones in need are us. He designed the weekly routine to remind us to take time to rest in the Lord. There is controversy over whether rest should be an entire day or not; should we all employ the Chickfila rule or not. Getting in arguments over it I think misses the point. The point is we need good, healthy rest in the Lord. A time where it’s just us and Him; no distractions from work and life.
When we build our routine in life, I truly believe that as long as we have a time of rest in the Lord, then everything else will fall into place.