It’s so much easier to do the right thing for yourself and for your family when you aren’t trying to keep up with those around you.
set healthy limits
Know yourself, be honest with yourself. We have to be willing to recognize our stressors, our limits, and not worry when that looks different from those around us. We must allow others to be at peace with their own limitations as well. Problems arise when we find those limits and ignore them.
“Some,” Dr. Swenson writes, “will respond, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ Does this mean you can fly? Can you go six months without eating? Neither can you live a healthy life chronically overloaded. God did not intend this verse to represent a negation of life-balance.”
If we want peace, we have to be willing to admit we have limits.
“Not all threshold limits are appreciated as we near them,” says Dr. Swenson, “and it is only in exceeding them that we suddenly feel the breakdown.” You don’t know you’re on overload until you’ve overloaded.
What I’ve learned in this journey is that we can have order on many levels, but we need to be taking all these aspects into consideration together. Our body, mind, and spirit each know when things are out of order. If you are drinking too much caffeine, your body will tell you. If your focus is always negative, your mind will suffer. And when you run yourself ragged, even if there are enough hours in the day, your spirit will eventually send up a flare and beg you to reconsider.
It’s okay to admit you are on overload. God didn’t create us to do all the things all the time. In fact, built right into our first glimpse of God in Genesis, he creates a day for us to rest. He wants us to take time to reboot, to catch our breath, and to look at the beauty around us instead of going, going, going.
Time off, observing the Sabbath, slowing down at the end of the day — these take effort. We must fight for quiet, especially in a world that makes twenty-four hours of productivity a possibility (have you ever checked your email in the middle of the night? It’s possible to never step away from the To-Do’s!).
We have to work for margins of sanity. We need to fight to maintain that healthy space that exists between doing what we need to do and the state of absolute burnout.
“He restores my soul,” says Psalm 23:3. Part of the way God restores us is by enabling us with common sense that uses our body, mind, and spirit to guide us away from doing too much. The body can handle a lot of stress, but when it gets past the point of healthy stress, it will tell you. Remember those panic attacks I had while driving down the highway? That was my body trying to tell me to step back.
If you are living with that concrete-block-on-my-chest feeling all the time, your body might be trying to tell you to adjust something.
When we start finding that life feels exhausting or that we are always sad or angry or sick, it’s time to consider all the things we have going on and figure out what needs to change.
That’s called limits, my friend, and they are there to keep us sane.
God cares
In the midst of all the effort to have order, peace, and a simple life filled with joy — God is there!
These efforts to streamline are efforts to hear God. When we cut away all the fat, the excess, the busy work, and the things that drag us down, it is easier to tune in to the voice of God.
The beautiful reality is that God cares about all of this, because this approach to simplicity will draw us closer to him. There is no detail too small for his gaze. God wants us to be happy, and he wants us to have the freedom to use the gifts he’s given us to build the Church. Whatever that means for you in your life, God wants to help you figure that out. And when we have the right kind of order, we find the peace we need. We can hear God guiding us with his wisdom and love. This helps us move throughout our days in the life he’s called each one of us to live, in a way that glorifies him.
“He is not the God of disorder but of peace,” says 1 Corinthians 14:33. God cares for us and wants our lives filled with peace.
Ultimately, an ordered relationship with our Creator is at the heart of pure freedom and joy. We must know how much God loves us, and learn to experience that love. When our relationship with God is working as it should, we find the most important kind of peace — that which is deep within, abiding and transforming.
At the heart of all of our struggle for order, God is waiting. When we talk about menus, laundry, and carpool schedules, God is tied into it. It’s crazy, because too often we convince ourselves that God doesn’t care about the minutiae of our day. God can’t drive my carpool for me, so why should I include him in any of it?
But I have learned from experience that while God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit aren’t necessarily who I consult before I plan my weekly meals, they are strangely involved in every aspect of my day. Before I do something as simple as rearrange my front room furniture, I ask for guidance from the Holy Spirit. I know that sounds weird, but when I do, he always shows up. I end up with some idea, some plan, that I never saw coming — something that is the answer to my hopes for creating a comfy space for my family to gather.
God cares.
So, yes, a prayer life and interior peace and not being overloaded with life in general — these are all important in the quest for a simplified, ordered life.
But first, let’s talk about having a clean kitchen sink. Because that helps a lot too.
practical peace, order within the home
Paperwork, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens — these things, too, are the works of peace.
— Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker (December 1965)
An ordered life is one that gives each task the attention it deserves. This means that small tasks should get a small amount of our attention. When our lives feel out of order, we start to have an imbalance in where we put our energy. I have felt firsthand the stress that comes from the details of life being out of balance. Knowing what to cook for dinner shouldn’t be some epic achievement. But when you are running around like a crazy woman, it sometimes is.
Before we proceed, I want to stress something. In family life, it’s important to recognize that we go through seasons. “Season” is one of my favorite words. I use it a lot because I think it keeps so much in perspective. The mother with a newborn baby should not be striving for the kind of order that a mom of bigger kids might have. Mamas with newborns shouldn’t focus on anything other than survival. You give yourself time — six weeks, ten weeks, seven months — whatever it takes, until you start to feel some semblance of sanity and normalcy. And then, when you can peacefully begin to think “bigger picture” (beyond getting through this feeding session, the one that will end just in time for the next one to begin), it’s time to come up with a plan.
This concept of “season” can apply to all kinds of times. Christmas season. Basketball season. Flu season. The weeks of your oldest child starting school outside the home. These are all times of different kinds of stress, and it’s okay to say, in those seasons, that you are putting one foot in front of the other. Having four children playing on three separate teams might not be the time to be organizing all the closets. This is the time to get your children to the next practice and the next games.