Make My Life Simple. Rachel Balducci

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      Order and peace and organization and limits — all these things will look different for different people. That was part of my challenge in my journey toward redirecting and reviving my focus. I looked at the women around me, who seemed to be doing the exact same thing as me and then some. I was especially aware of the women who worked at the school fulltime alongside me, who also had children still at home and seemed to manage it all beautifully. They spent more hours at the school than I did and didn’t seem the least bit frazzled.

      Unfortunately, I allowed that comparison to make me blind to my own struggle. If they can do it, I reasoned, I should be able to!

      In his book on restoring sanity to overloaded lives, Dr. Richard Swenson is quick to point out that physical and mental stress looks different for different people.

      “Individuals differ significantly regarding how much stress is desirable or what types of events are distressing,” he writes in Margin. “What strains some does not bother others.… A stressor that for one might be pleasure, for another might be pain. For one, the price of life; for another, the kiss of death.”

      People have different levels of stress that they can tolerate, as well as different events that cause stress in different ways. So one event that I might find totally relaxing, you might find completely stressful. And vice versa.

      “We must understand,” Dr. Swenson writes, “that everyone has a different tolerance for overload and a different threshold level when breakdown begins to occur. It is important for us to set people free to seek their own level.”

      In other words, don’t compare!

      True peace and order, a simplified life, has at its core a true understanding of what God is asking of you. This is why it’s so important to always be working toward closer union with God — we have to have a real relationship with him to understand what it is he wants of us. It’s not enough to look at the people around you, people with similar gifts or at a similar place in life. In fact, this could lead to envy and absolute burnout! While it’s nice to be inspired by those around us, we do have to keep our eyes on our own paper.

      Here is where a holistic approach to simplicity and peace comes in. We pay attention to our spiritual, mental, and physical needs, and we make lots of small efforts to care for the many areas of our life. We make decisions based on prayer and common sense, and not by looking to see what other people are up to. So much peace and freedom come when we learn to be who we are, who God made each of us to be, and to live the life he called each one of us to live. Personally, I’m the wife and mom of the Family Balducci, and there is no other family out there exactly like us! Paul and I will make decisions for our family life with criteria that won’t look like anyone else’s.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ