chapter 5: have peace in your mind
chapter 6: have peace in your spirit and heart
part III: peace and order in our spiritual growth: Jesus, others, you
chapter 7: spirituality and Jesus
chapter 8: spirituality and others
chapter 9: spirituality and you
first things first
When I first considered a book on order, inspired by a life of order, I was a mom with six kids at home. I had recently started working outside the home after spending eighteen years making work fit within my at-home schedule. Like mothers everywhere, I’ve always seen motherhood as my primary vocation, but personally had decided that my professional life needed to fit within my home life. I had found a way to balance a career as a writer and speaker with being a wife and mother, a schedule that worked for me as someone married to a busy attorney who owned his own practice. Add to this the fact that by our sixth anniversary, Paul and I had four sons. Early on, me staying home made the most sense.
But the years went on, and we added another son and (hooray!) a daughter at the end. Five boys and one sweet little girl. Life was busy and crazy and fun. During those years, I wrote from home and traveled for speaking engagements, and this compartmentalization worked well. I could go away for a few days for work and leave highly specific lists in extra-large black Sharpie font, and it was business as usual for my husband and kids until I returned.
When our daughter, Isabel, started kindergarten, I worried that I would feel bored. After so many years of being home and fitting work in between juggling small children, the thought of an entire day with no kids at home seemed vast and empty. It was probably time to find something to do to fill those hours. “What kind of a stay-at-home mom doesn’t have kids at home with her?” I asked, rhetorically.
This was the question I posed to myself, and I should have sat still long enough to consider the answer. Indeed, what kind of stay-at-home mom doesn’t have kids at home during the day? The answer is, plenty. Moms of bigger kids know what I had not yet learned: just because your children are at school for a few hours does not mean you will feel sad, lonely, and bored. Bored?! Perish the thought. Not to worry, boredom doesn’t seem to be on the horizon anytime soon.
But I did not wait for an answer to my question, and I didn’t stop to think through all the ways my already full schedule wouldn’t clear out only because my youngest was now in kindergarten.
So I signed up to teach full-time at the school my children attend.
And it was wonderful. I absolutely loved it. I loved connecting with the students; I loved learning as much as I taught; I loved being out and away from my home, and generally all the joy and excitement of a new adventure. I loved the change of scenery, and I loved meeting a need. Our small, private school needed an English teacher, and I was able to help. It was new and exciting, and I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Around this time, I started to think about how being organized brings peace — the problem was, I didn’t understand yet what peace means. When you have a nice system for the many moving parts of your life, I decided, you can do anything. If you have a smart, efficient method for keeping the house clean, making a menu and paying your bills, then you are allowed to move about the calendar as freely as you please.
But this is not realistic, and I’m so glad a book didn’t get written by me in that stage. You can indeed do anything when you have a few free hours on your daily calendar, but the fruit of doing all the things all the time is not good. I learned this the hard way.
Fast forward a few years. I had been teaching at the school for three years, and in the meantime we sent our oldest son off to college and watched our second son graduate from high school. The next year we would have our third high school graduation in four years, with a one-year break before yet another son’s graduation. When you have your first four children in five years, those children finish high school at a shocking rate.
Life was moving at a dizzying speed, and my brain and heart were beginning to wrestle with this new season. We were no longer a family all under one roof. I was no longer dropping off all my sweet little babies at the same school, all of us riding in the same giant van. We were dispersed, slowly moving from a life that was like a solid block of cheese to a life that had been set on the counter too long and was spreading out, melting.
In my brain, that’s how things felt. All the things I needed to keep track of were no longer in one solid chunk. Gone were the days of multiple boys on the same sports teams, of all my children coming and going from the same K-12 school. Now, we were all over the place. My people were no longer simply in my home or at school, but moving away, going to college, and coming and going at all hours of the day and night.
The “little things mean a lot” approach to organization worked when my kids were little. Make your lunches the night before, put people in bed before they are overtired, have a calendar that lays out the week. However, as my children grew and our world expanded, I knew that those little things were great, but inner peace had to come from a much deeper well. Suddenly, the day didn’t end at 8:30 p.m., or even by 10:00! Bigger kids stay up late to study for exams; they come and go at different hours. My brain was going, going, going because I thought my fabulous organizational skills meant I could do every single thing I wanted to do. Suddenly, those methods that I thought were the key to doing it all (planning ahead and sticking to the plan) were no longer effective. They helped, but they didn’t stop the tiny hamster that was running inside my head.
And so I began to question my approach to order and peace. I realized that God is indeed an ocean of peace, and that he wants that peace for each one of us. But how we will find that peace will shift and expand within the different seasons of our life. Now that my world is a little more complicated, the peace I need will come from sources other than a clean front room and the joy of a well-oiled laundry system. (Also, nap time no longer exists. Just saying.)
What do I mean when I talk about peace? Peace is considered to be the presence of harmony and the absence of conflict. So when we talk about peace within ourselves, we mean the presence of harmony in our thoughts and attitudes, in our home and in our relationships. Peace means a lack of conflict in our soul, in our relationships with God and with those around us.
Despite my best efforts to get on top of my angst and anxiety, I was overwhelmed to the core. No amount of list-making and prior planning quelled the weird feelings in my gut. I felt nervous all the time. I was always going over what I needed to do next, where we needed to go next, how we were going to get all the things done for everyone: for my kids, for my students, for the many sub-groupings on my daily calendar (Carline! Staff meeting! Doctors’ appointments! Writing deadlines!)
What had started as a wonderful, peaceful commitment to work at my children’s school had become my driving focus. No one had done that to me except myself — me and my desire to say yes and be involved and help out with everything. And so, about six weeks into that school year,