Give up and Get

This Lent, I’m trying to simplify.

The idea that simplifying can bring us closer to God is fairly easy to get behind. But the application is pretty difficult. Near impossible. How do we simplify when the world constantly demands the opposite? When it tells us that to be successful we must pack our schedules to the max, up our spending, fill our homes with more and more stuff, and do or be any number of competing personas all at once?

That’s why I love the season of Lent. It’s meant to be a time of internal renewal away from all the external pressures. For forty days, the church tries to set aside that time that the world refuses to give us, the kind we so desperately need. In ancient traditions, Lent was a forty-day period of time before Easter when those who wanted to become baptized Christians learned about the faith they wanted to profess—Jesus’s life, his death and resurrection, and the beliefs and practices of the early church. It was also a time when baptized Christians who had fallen away or gotten into bad habits in the past year could renew their baptismal promises and re-commit themselves to their faith, celebrating with the newly baptized on Easter. Lent was created to be a season that was very purifying and baptismal in nature. And Lent today is still very similar—it’s intended for a time of cleansing, recommitment, and renewal as we get ready to celebrate Christ’s resurrection and sacrifice for us. It's a chance to get back right with the world, re-calibrate our priorities, and remind ourselves that our souls deserve just as much attention and require just as much maintenance as our minds and bodies.

So back to the simplification. I've realized that the demands on our time and finances and sanity as a family are absolutely taking their toll--mind, body, and soul. Simplifying has been on my mind and heart a few times recently. And because God must know how good I am at picking up on subtlety and hints, I’ve been getting hit with reminders from Him left and right the past few weeks. He really drove it home this past Sunday. (Twice). First, there were the [yet again paraphrased] words of our pastor as he talked about Lent being a built-in spiritual “pause” for us. He talked about other countries and cultures knowing how to slow down and really live life, but we as Americans just keep pushing the envelope:

“…so why don’t we take a break? Because we think it’s more efficient? In fact, numerous studies have shown that we’re much more productive when we’re able to take a pause, and that the most miserable people in the world are the ones who keep going and going and filling their schedule. We need to take a pause, a break, to appreciate life and the beautiful world we’ve been given. And that’s what Lent is for us in our faith. A deliberate pause to listen more closely for God and allow Him to lead us back to the building blocks of our faith and the meaning of our life.”

Then there was this video about all of the noise in our lives. We showed it to the teens in our Youth Group later that night, and spent awhile discussing the insane amount of noise and distraction we not only deal with, but actively seek out, on a daily basis. The first time I saw the video was during our planning meeting last week, and its truth hit me squarely between the eyes. If you have ten minutes, I highly recommend it. Yes, some of the references are a little dated, but the message is loud and clear (no pun intended!): adding more noise and stuff to our lives isn’t going to get us closer to God. What will get us closer to Him is setting aside time for silence and solitude to focus on listening for Him.

So with those reminders, my plan to simplify life this Lent is this: to “give up and get,” meaning give up a little something trivial in order to get something much more meaningful in return.

• I’m going to give up a little time sleeping in each morning (half an hour) to get fed by some spiritual reading:

• I’m going to give up extra spending, and hopefully gain the satisfaction of time and money well-spent. No impulse buying. No splurging. We have more than enough of what we need and then some. Other than food and fuel, we have no actual need for anything else in this house or in our life. We are beyond blessed with abundance, and I need to stop convincing myself that I ‘need’ more. So for the holidays and celebrations that are coming up, to include graduations and birthdays and Easter, I’m going to focus on putting our money where really it counts—by investing in experiences, not things (i.e. trips to the museum together, mini vacations or staycations, movie nights, donations that support those in reall need). I’m also going to focus on repurposing old stuff to fill the time I usually spend online ‘window’ shopping or taking another "innocent" trip to Target. Because we all know how those go. I have a million Pinterest pins of things I could repurpose, create, sew, bake…tons of activities I could do with the kids for an afternoon, etc. It’s just a matter of deliberately filling my time with things that I already have and can make use of (and maybe even enjoy the discovery of a new hobby), instead of spending my time (and excess money) pining after the emptiness of things I truly don’t need.

A little accountability to put charity and purdence
before selfishness:
I literally have to move this little reminder
every time I open my wallet to use my cards.

• And possibly toughest of all,  I’m going to give up excess time on my phone (coughFacebookInstagramcough) to get more joy out of better relationships with me kids--the ones I’m constantly treating as interruptions whenever I’m surfing or scrolling or texting or all of those other things that are so much less important than they are. I don't want to cut myself off completely, because I want to make it a realistic goal and a behavior change, not something I just jump right back into after forty days. So I set what I think are some plausible limits: I'm staying off social media between the hours of 7am and 8pm when the kids are awake. Granted, I may find some time when they’re at school or we're waiting in the car or otherwise occupied, and I'm okay with allowing myself some of that free time to pay a quick visit to the social media scene. But the goal is to teach myself to look at my family's faces instead of my phone when we're spending time together. To make them my priority when they’re in front of me and truly in need of the attention I’m usually so stingy with. So if you see me completely bulldozing my time constraints one day on some such social media site, I give you full permission to admonish me soundly!

Lastly, as a family we’re continuing the tradition of stepping up the acts of love and service (along with my ability to recognize them!), and we devised a way to keep track of our good deeds while beauitifying the cross. For every act of love or sacrifice, they can add a stone from the Christmas Manger  to the foot of the cross, helping to counteract the suffering caused by all the actions in the world devoid of love and sacrifice. The simple wooden cross is accompanied by a rose, with its thorns (depicting the suffering) and single beautiful bloom (showing the life and beauty born from the ultimate love and sacrifice). Around it we’ve placed a prickly “crown” covered with burlap in royal purple—a contradiction illustrating the Roman soldiers’ mockery of Jesus as King of the Jews, since only royalty could afford to wear expensive purple cloth; yet through their mockery they were unwittingly uttering the truth: that Christ was the most honorable of royalty who ever lived. The burlap is also symbolic of the burlap sack cloth worn in biblical times as a sign of repentance and self-induced poverty. It was an outward sign of the things one was trying to focus on internally--becoming simple. Breaking free of the distraction that comes with materialism. And those are exactly the things we need as a family.

Most importantly, through all of this simplification and intentional reflection, I’m making sure that I allow myself to be flexible and human. Putting extra pressure on myself to check the block every day, and only make it about getting through my list (instead of a few select things to help me renew) very obviously defeats the purpose. So I’m not going to beat myself up over a day of missed reading or an item from the One Spot that sneaks into my cart. I’ll just pick back up where I started. Because in the end, I’m not trying to move mountains; I'm just trying to make gradual adjustments that can stick, and train my soul to hear God a little better. So a little more silence, a lot less stuff, fewer random Facebook quizzes (I’m a beaver who should live in Georgia, by the way) and a lot more compassion for myself—like the kind God has for me—is the general formula I know I need to get on the same page as Him. In the end, no matter how much or how little progress I've made after forty days, He knows I'm trying. And after forty days, He'll still be there for me. 

Simple as that.