Monday 4 March 2013

A Lent of simplicity- Work time

I often find it difficult to find time to work on stuff for the church. I consider myself a full time pastor even though I don't have an office or even a real job, but I'm certainly not able to put the hours in that I want to. I work part time as a courier driving around Kitchener-Waterloo, and when I'm at home I get to spend my time as a stay-at-home dad, which is great but doesn't lend itself to a lot of computer time.

Conversations on simplicity often come down to what we can stop doing, or what we can give up in order to simplify our lives. But sometimes the thing that make our lives more complicated are the stresses and fears about the things that we're not doing. There are things that we know we should do, that we actually need to do, and when we don't feel like we have the time and energy for them, it increases our stress.

One thing that I've found incredible for our family is dedicating time for work. Yes, it's still in the evenings and weekends when we'd rather be relaxing, but in the past, we often filled this time with things that weren't really all that beneficial anyway. But the strangest thing is the way that scheduling time for work has felt like it has simplified my day. But it's not scheduling work which has simplified it; it's finding time for what I want to do.

What are the things that you want to do? What are the things that take up your time? In order to find simplification, you need to look at your life and answer these questions. 

For the next week, pick a time for you to do something you want to do. Just find the time, schedule it and do it. It's called pre-deciding, (no, I didn't come up with that). Pre-decide to work towards simplification.

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