Dear Abiding Sisters, it’s been over a month I believe since I wrote to you all and said I hoped to post here once a week. Life’s twists and turns continually remind me that:
A man’s heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps. (Proverbs 16:9)
I had a carefully laid out plan, each Thursday evening I usually had a few hours set aside by my husband and I for me to go to grab a cup of coffee and run errands. Basically, it was a once a week break for a few hours in which I could do some things apart from the children. That was the time I had set aside in my mind to write here. That very weekend brought our family a week of sickness, followed by a week of completely out of the ordinary commitments, followed by another week of sickness, and the pattern continued. I haven’t had a “Thursday night break” since I last wrote because something has always come up each week since. We are in a very busy season of life. I know we all have tons of commitments and full lives. I think it’s probably one of our generation’s downfalls, that we tend to overextend ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I have so many things I genuinely desire to do, that it’s easy to get way too much on my plate. Sometimes things get put on the back burner and plans fall through. That’s what happened with my little substack plan, and with that I’ll just go ahead a make a new plan. How about I will write when I can? I probably should’ve said that from the start.
So how do we slow down? How do we get less busy?
Elisabeth Elliot said, “There’s always enough time to do the will of God.” Perhaps, when we feel overwhelmed and overloaded, we are trying to do things that anre outside of the will of God. Some of these things may be good things, like sending out a weekly letter to encourage and connect with other sisters in Christ, but even good things can be the wrong things if our priorities are off.
What should our priorities be anyway? I just attended the Church and Family Life Conference, the theme of the conference this year was “the chief end of man” which is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. This truly is what we were made for, to glorify God. So the activities in our lives should be to glorify Him. Of course we can glorify Him in many ways, there isn’t really a sacred and secular divide when it comes to glorifying God because we can eat, drink, work, and play to the glory of God.
Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)
So perhaps a good place to start when it comes to decluttering our schedules is asking why we are doing what we are doing, is it truly to glorify God?
Making time to enjoy and glorify God
Are we spending time with the Lord? Are we getting to know Him and delighting in who He is? Enjoying God isn’t something we just get zapped by the Holy Spirit and randomly start doing. God has given us certain activities that are sometimes referred to as “the ordinary means of grace”,these are the paths by which we grow in the grace and knowledge of God. They are things like prayer, fasting, meditation on the Word, reading the Word, sitting under the preaching of the Word, fellowshipping with other believers, weekly coming together with the local Church to worship the Lord corporately, take the Lord’s supper, and sit under sound Biblical preaching and teaching together. These are the ways by which we grow in our enjoyment of God and glorify Him with our lives. These things should be a top priority. We should never be too busy for these ordinary means of grace.
The Way Wives and Mothers Glorify God
The next step is to make sure our other priorities are aligned with what Scripture tells us our priorities should be. For most of us ladies, we are married with children, this means we have some pretty basic Scriptural commands which will dictate the majority of our time. Titus 2 shows us what the life of a married woman with children is suppose to look like:
that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. (Titus 2:4-5)
Our lives are to be largely focused on our husbands, children, and homes. Sure, we can do other things outside of those spheres but not at the expense of them. Our first priorities as married women are found right within the walls of our own homes.
The fleshly pull towards something else.
I believe one way we wives and mamas get ourselves into overwhelm is because our flesh often draws us to desire something more than those basic responsibilities. Even though we likely know in our hearts how very important these things are, in our day in and day out moments we crave something different. Perhaps we want connection with other adults, and so we spend too much of our time on social media, or out and about participating in play dates and homeschool co-ops. Not that social media, play dates, or co-ops are wrong, but sometimes we can do those things at the expense of our first priorities of our husbands, children, and homes. Perhaps we feel the need or desire to make money, or make an impact on the world, or help and encourage other women, and these things are not wrong either, but we can sometimes find that we’ve been more disciplined to carry out those tasks than we have been to prioritize time with our husbands in the evenings, or time reading to our children, or time to tackle that pile of laundry that’s getting higher and higher. I’ll go ahead and admit that I’m preaching to myself here. I’m sensing my own need to reexamine my commitments and time allocations to see if they are in their proper proportions to the things God’s Word makes it clear I should be putting first.
This is important because as we saw in the Scripture above, the Word of God is blasphemed when we do not prioritize our husbands, children, and home above other seemingly good pursuits.
In the end, our lives still will likely be full, but hopefully they will be filled with the right things, and that will lead us to feel much more at peace because we haven’t overextended ourselves trying to do things outside of God’s will for us. At the end of the day, we might still be exhausted, but hopefully we’ve exhausted ourselves enjoying and glorifying God. That’s time and energy well spent!
Let’s do it together.
Let’s take a little time to pray and ask the Lord if some of the good and enjoyable things we’ve been doing lately have been hindering us from the things He has called us to put first on our to do lists. I can’t be the only one struggling with this, I talk to enough women in real life to know I’m not. Let me know if you are wanting to hit the reset button and put your God ordained priorities back in their rightful place in your life. I’d love to keep chatting with you ladies about this in the comments or in email responses. (Whichever you prefer)
And with that, it’s time for me to get back to my first priorities and start getting our dinner on the table. It was a joy to get to write to you all again, and I hope to do so…. whenever I get the chance to without sacrificing something more important.
Abiding in Christ,
Stacey
Thank you Stacey for your beautiful written email it hit home for me. I have been feeling "off" and I see that I'm doing too much "busy" work and not spending enough of my time in what matters God. I love the message from Elisabeth Elliot it gave me an aha! moment I was recently introduced to her writings and podcast on Spotify and as I am learning about what it means to follow and love God I am thankful for people like you who when they can make the time to share about his message and love. God bless you sister and your family. - Yesenia M
Hi Stacey,
I love your recent posting. It was very timely for me to read what the Lord has been teaching you lately. This is something He has been revealing to me, too. Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to deviate from our good and enjoyable calling as wives, mothers, and homemakers, and devote our time to other things that don’t rightly deserve first place? I think this is one way our deceiver tricks us into believing “we can have it all”. And you’re right - those other things are still good things! But we have to keep our primary role the primary focus. All the other things are extra. I could list quite a few areas of my life that have been neglected because I choose to fill my time with other activities. My lack of attention to the callings the Lord placed first for my life becomes evident as the laundry piles up (high and wide), the dishes fill the sink and counters, my children begin crying for time with me “all by myself”, and tension rises between my husband and me. I also find that it becomes easier to forsake time with the Lord because I feel so behind in my housework. For me, I recognize these flags fairly quickly and then the guilt rolls in. Praise the Lord for His abounding grace. I’m so thankful the Holy Spirit speaks to me and helps me see through conviction that I need to put the brakes on and redirect my focus. Thank you for sharing your experience with this. I’m glad to not be the only one who struggles with distractions. Your family is beautiful and I love seeing a glimpse into your life. I hope you have a wonderful week!