Every good plan starts with a passion and a dream.
I have so many passions. I have a passion for beauty through freshly cut flowers, words that fit together like an interlocking puzzle, a meal shared with friends, and a piano piece that swells and recedes with feeling. I love order, like a stack of towels folded to be the same size, crumb free counter tops, sharpened pencils, and a bookshelf with spines perfectly aligned.
I have a deep desire to be unendingly generous because I have been so blessed by the generosity of others. I want to send meals because a mama needs to rest, overnight surprise gifts because I’m thinking of someone, and support the spread of the Gospel because I want every single person to have the deep, comforting, everlasting hope that I have - that once every tribe and tongue has heard, Jesus is coming back. And oh how I long for His return.
I’ve walked through hard things, and I’ve learned more than most thirty something year olds should know. As I’m running forward, I want to turn back to those stepping where I’ve been, and say “Come along! You can do it! Take what I’ve learned and keep going!” Sometimes I want this so much that I drown people in advice. hahaha.
I dream of a joyful chaotic day sitting around my table with adult children, their spouses, and grandchildren. And I dream of a day in a city called Glory, living out a full eternal life in God’s presence alongside the immense throng of people that I love so dearly.
There are plans that start from a place of reactivity. A negative yearly review, an overdrawn bank account, an overwhelming mess, a horrible fight with friend or family - these can all lead us to want to pull on our steel toed work boots, set our alarms for 5 AM, and determine to grind until the job is done.
These types of plans work for a time, but they often lead to despair, discouragement, overwhelm, and quick ends.
So what are these negative moments, if they are not a moment to react?
They are an invitation to dream.
These moments are an opportunity to ask ourselves, “What do I love? What do I want? What do I think life should look like right now? How can I chase the things that bring myself and others joy?”
Our big dreams can sit on the shelves of our brain and our heart as ever elusive realities, or they can break down into much smaller, achievable practicalities. For instance, my dream of having a joyful, chaotic table full of children and grandchildren is a beautiful picture in my mind. But there are a pile of things that need to happen to get there. My children need to be educated, financially solvent, emotionally healthy, critical thinking adults so that they can eat, provide for their families, maintain relationships, and pay to travel home! I have a significant responsibility to help them achieve these things.
In light of wanting to pursue dreams, honor my responsibilities and callings, and care well for those around me, I realized that I needed a daily schedule.
I started with my dreams. I wrote them out, I pondered them, I considered which ones I wanted to pursue right now. There will be time to pursue some of my dreams later, and some of my dreams will come to fruition in various seasons in different ways.
Raising my children, cultivating a beautiful and orderly home, sustaining and investing in my marriage, growing my income, expanding my writing muscle, and caring for my community, are all things that either cannot wait, or are building blocks for the rest of my dreams. So this is where I chose to start.
After dreaming and identifying what needs to happen now, I wrote out a list of things that need to happen every day to move towards those goals. I included everything, and I mean everything: making my bed, folding the towels, showering, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, taking my vitamins, bathing my children, writing, reading my Bible, fiction, and nonfiction. It wasn’t all possible. There weren’t enough hours in a day!
And that was totally ok. This helped me right size my current goals and avoid burnout. I went back to the drawing board and re-evaluated.
I looked at what needs to happen in a day to care for my body, brain, emotions, those of my family, and maintain my home. Then I looked at the additional space. There’s probably an hour or two a day for dedicated work, and an hour or two a day that I will naturally take to zone out. There’s also weekend time.
So I also made a list of things that could get done in those big blocks of time. If I spend two hours a week writing, and two hours a week building a business, and have one family over for dinner a month, or spend one morning a week with some mom friends, that is more investing in the fruition of my dreams than if I didn’t plan at all.
While it may seem like a lot of work to make all of this happen, here’s the thing: we talk in our culture about not losing ourselves as moms. We talk about not getting lost in raising kids. I think so much of why this happens is because we fail to dream. But then when we do dream, we fail to truly evaluate our lives and see how we can make it happen. We tend to say “it’s too much,” and chunk it all back into the recesses of our hearts, where it doesn’t blossom into beauty, it rots into bitterness, loneliness, and despair.
God has woven into each of our designs beauty and passions that are a small part of His passion, design, and creativity. He doesn’t call us to set who He has made us to be on the shelf just because He blessed us with children or a career. He invites us to pursue Him and the fullness of who He has called us to be.
Listen, this isn’t the season for me to run a women’s ministry department, live in Nepal, have a spotless, Kondo’d, edited home, or plant a wildflower garden. God has given me six humans in my household to care for, and by His grace, He has turned my heart toward them. But in this season, I CAN fold my towels just the way I like, wipe my countertops every evening, write for an hour a week, read ten pages of a novel in the rocking chair, lead a community group on Sundays after church, and share products that I love using on instagram.
Do you see how this works? Pursue the passion in the space and time that you have.
Ok, back to the schedule. Once I wrote everything that needed to happen in a day and narrowed it down to a realistic list, I wrote the items out in the order that I thought I naturally do them in a day. I paid attention to it for a few weeks. What was easy to do? What took extra focus? What didn’t fit? What needed to be moved around because where I was trying to do it every day wasn’t working?
THEN, I wrote it all out. I used 15-30 minute time blocks because I have little kids who need lots of direction and have short attention spans. If I need to toss a 15 minute time block for a day, that won’t kill anything. I built in three 2-3 hour white spaces. For me, these are during a morning playtime for the kids, an afternoon quiet time, and after the kids’ bedtime. One of these is scheduled for work, one is scheduled for rest, and one is completely empty. I do certain work best in the right mood, so sometimes I swap around what I’m doing in each block dependent on my mood. (Once my littlest is sleeping on her own and nursing less, I will try to get up an hour or two before the kids and have some time there as well.) These are where I fit in the brain work, the excess house work that I didn’t get to during scheduled time, and the relationships.
I broke the schedule down into three sections, one for time, one for kids, and one for mom. I get dressed before they leave their room in the morning, they unload the dishwasher while I make breakfast, together we clean up after breakfast, gather and start laundry, read aloud, spend some time playing together, and then we all go our separate ways until lunch time. I built in two 15 minute pick ups (we usually end up doing at least one).
I also wrote out two additional slightly different schedules for days when we are leaving the house, one for adventures and one for Sundays.
The desire to build a schedule started in response to several things. I could see that all day free play was no longer serving my oldest and that he needed to be able to expect more structure. I also knew that we are planning to homeschool in the fall, and I didn’t want to wait until the fall to establish school routines. That would make the transition to kindergarten and homeschooling far too much for us. The way I’ve built the schedule still allows my younger girls the illusion of mostly all day free play, and it sets us up for school in the fall. Our morning reading time will become a slightly more focused reading time, and my son will spend part of afternoon quiet time working on reading with me.
The schedule was in response to both a need and a dream, and I sat down to dream when I recognized the need. I hope you can see how beautifully this can work together!
Start your plans from your dreams, friends. Don’t change things in your life out of desperation. Allow the desperation to send you to the feet of Jesus, where you remember who He has created and called you to be. Then shape your daily routines out of those spiritual realities.
Ask all the questions you’d like about specifics of my schedule in the comments or in my instagram dms!
Here’s a step by step:
Spend time praying and reflecting
Write out your big dreams
Break your dreams down into daily or weekly actionables
Consider your every day practicalities & realities
Write out everything that needs to happen in a day
Structure the daily list in order that you think you can do it
Spend a few weeks loosely following it that order
Rethink and restructure
Write out a schedule with specific time frames
Introduce the schedule to the fam
Be patient with the schedule and your adjustment
Give it time
Re-evaluate in 4 weeks
Here’s a few amazing resources for you:
The Fringe Hours: Making Time for You - This book taught me how to find windows in my day to pursue the things that I love.
Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms - I considered family rhythms I wanted to incorporate while reading this.
The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids - Ohhhh just read it. You’ll be blown away.
A Good Measure - This new blog is about thinking through your finances with generosity in mind.
Rhythms of Renewal: Trading Stress and Anxiety for a Life of Peace and Purpose - When I read this, I found myself learning to give value to many of the things that I love
The Dream Guide - Jennie Allen shares this incredible dreaming resource every year. She breaks out different areas of life, and walks you through dreaming and praying about them!
Alright, friends! I hope this post encourages you and fills you with motivation to pursue the goodness and abundance that God gifted to you when He formed your inmost being and placed you here on this earth for such a time as this.
With a full heart and so much love,
Rebecca