Julia L. Roller's Blog

24 hours of silent retreat. . . It was part of my very first weeklong residency for the Renovare Institute, a two-year program in spiritual formation I began this fall. I’d eagerly anticipated the residency for months– a week in Seattle learning from Christian teachers and meeting other nerdy Christian reader people like me–but I wasn’t entirely sure about the silent retreat part. Some of me thought by the time I’d met all those new people and had every meal and session with them for five days that I would be more than ready for 24 hours of silence, and the other part of me suspected my smartphone- and social media-broken brain would explode.

The days passed quickly. Sooner than anticipated, Trevor Hudson was giving us instructions for entering our silent retreat. (If you don’t know Trevor Hudson, RUN, do not walk, to your local library or favorite bookstore and get Discovering Our Spiritual Identity. He is such a gifted and gentle teacher. If he asked me to pack up my wheelie bag and follow him, I would do it.) That afternoon, as we prepared for our silent retreat, I particularly appreciated his admonition to care for ourselves, to rest but also to exercise. He spoke of appreciating the gifts afforded by a retreat: place, space, and time. But what really stayed with me (and still resonates) is a story he told about a silent retreat of his own, guided by a nun who told him after the second day that the first prize in spiritual formation was not insight but encounter.

Encounter, not insight. I reacted so strongly to these three words that I wondered if others could see the light bulb going off over my head. My whole life was words and insight. That was why I read the Bible, why I read books, why I read the news and listened to podcasts.

Insight is very rewarding–it feels great to understand (or to think you understand) what the words in the Bible are saying. Sometimes I feel triumphant, like I cracked a code, and other times I feel a sense of satisfaction and peace after learning something new or reflecting on something old. Yet it is very possible to get stuck in insight and never engage your actual emotions, heart, and soul. To never engage with God.

Encounter is the first prize.

I was very challenged indeed.

I began my silent retreat as I suspect many do, with a nap of several hours. I’m no longer in that stage of motherhood where I was envious of characters in books I read who went to PRISON because I assumed they could at least sleep a lot there, but I always seem to be a little sleep-deprived. In fact, I’m sure everyone else at the residency was slightly annoyed with me because all week I kept exclaiming how without my family and dog and house to look after and feed and clean and drive around I felt so rested, so nourished, so HYDRATED!

After my nap, I went for a walk to a nearby beach. As I walked, I sought encounter by talking to God, mainly about my anxiety and why I can’t seem to be free of it. Well, God did not suddenly appear on the path before me and clearly explain things, other than my thoughts being drawn to Paul’s words from 2 Corinthians 12:9 about God’s power “made perfect in weakness.” I felt more frustrated than delighted with that particular attempt at encounter as I returned to the retreat center and headed into our silent dinner.

Silent communal dinners are not for the faint of heart. I’ve never thought so much about how fast I eat and how loudly I chew as I tried to eat more slowly and not disturb anyone else with the somehow unbelievably obnoxious sound of my chewing. I was relieved to finish my dinner and escape upstairs to my room.

One of my favorite parts of the retreat week was the view from my second-floor window, across the water to a small harbor town on Maury Island. It was especially beautiful at night, when the town’s lights glowed in the darkness. I just stared across the water for what seemed like a very long time. The lights shining from the windows of those houses seemed to me to convey safety. Safe harbor. In my head I heard the words, “You are safe.” I grabbed my journal and wrote over and over again: I am safe. I am safe. I am safe.

It felt like a profound realization. Anxiety is based on fear, on not being safe. Those words felt like a strong repudiation of my fear.

They felt like encounter.

Suddenly, something appeared on the water, a long shape with crazily colored lights. It looked somehow like Eric Carle’s very hungry caterpillar but huge and seaworthy and lighted up. It appeared so strange and whimsical that I stared at it for quite a few seconds before finally clocking it as a barge. I watched, mesmerized, as the caterpillar barge slowly made its way past my window.

I was so taken by these two images that I went downstairs to where some art supplies had been set out for us and immediately tried to recreate the view from my window in watercolor. I tried, anyway. I’m not much of a watercolor artist, but I enjoyed the act of creating.

It felt significant that in this time of silence, God had spoken to me through images rather than words. It seemed like an important reminder to feel as well as to think. To experience as well as reflect. Encounter, not insight.

When our time of silence ended the next day, I felt disappointed. I had enjoyed the silence so much more than I had anticipated.

I think our souls crave silence–I know mine does, and the fact that we experience so little of it causes no small amount of soul sickness. God calls us to meet in the quiet place. God asks us to create the place, space, and time in our everyday lives for encounter. One of the small ways I’m doing that this Advent, on the advice of my spiritual director, is adding a daily alarm to my phone every day at 12 noon that says, “God’s presence.” Some of her directees do that every hour, but I’m not going to win that race so for me once a day when my phone beeps I think about where God is right that moment, around me, in the person or people I’m with, in the trees outside, in the air all around. I think about God in images. It helps.

Tell me: what are you doing to create place, space, and time for God this Advent season?

The post Surviving the Silence first appeared on Julia Roller.

It’s almost time for school to begin for my three children, and as much as I will miss the lazy days of summer, part of me can’t wait to have the house to myself again.

My eight-year-old daughter and I share a room that is her bedroom and my office, and in the summer that becomes, let’s say, more challenging. If you and I have been on a Zoom together, chances are you saw her pop up in the background. Sorry about that. As I’m writing this blog post, she is merrily wandering around the room and offering suggestions for reorganizing my desk.

I’ll be honest. I do enjoy having my office to myself. But when my kids are out of school, the thing I miss most is Monday mornings. I know we’re all supposed to hate Monday mornings, but I love them. When everyone else is off to school and work, that’s when I set about clearing up all the weekend mess and restoring the house to order. As my daughter (who may or may not have watched too much YouTube during the summer) would say, “It is SO satisfying.”

Alone. Well, just me and the dog.

I am a classic introvert. I love to be alone. Not ALL the time, but I seem to need a healthy dose of solitude to keep functioning well. I’ve found that if I don’t have any time alone, I start trying to get that solitude in unhealthy ways, like staying up too late after everyone else has gone to bed and streaming shows I don’t really care about despite being so tired I am nodding off. Or just sitting on the sofa late at night and making note of everything that needs to be picked up or vacuumed or otherwise addressed but feeling too tired to actually get up and do any of those things.

In Henri Nouwen’s classic book Reaching Out, he describes how in the Christian life we are in constant movement along a pole from loneliness (unhealthy) at one end to solitude (healthy) at the other. And one of his most surprising insights is that neither solitude nor loneliness has much to do with whether we are alone or with other people.  Instead, experiencing loneliness or solitude has more to do with our comfort level in our inner self. He explains that solitude is about being able to listen to our inner selves. If we cannot do this, we will feel lonely no matter how many people are around.

I think we all understand that it’s possible to feel lonely in a crowd. When my kids were babies, I often felt loneliness despite feeling like I would never actually be alone again (even amid the many charms of my tiny companions).

Many times we try to deal with these feelings of loneliness not by listening to our inner selves but by distracting ourselves. Nouwen writes in Reaching Out: “When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game which makes us believe that everything is fine after all” (p. 27). When I read that, I thought, “Ouch.” He wrote those words in 1975 and died in 1996.  I often wonder what Nouwen would have made of smartphones.

These days I think many of us struggle particularly with listening to our inner selves when it’s oh so easy to never have to be alone with our own thoughts. I know I struggle to cultivate and protect the silence necessary for this practice in a world so very full of distractions. I love distractions. Podcasts, news articles, emails, social media feeds, streaming shows, even books. In fact, I recently wrote about how I often use reading to distract myself in just the way Nouwen described above. The world is full of so many appealing distractions, and I have to admit that I spend a lot of my precious solitude on them.

The result is that sometimes that alone time feels more overwhelming than refreshing. For alone time to be healthy solitude requires at least some measure of silence.

For me, the answer is some form of silence every day. And that means silence from reading and taking in information just as much as audio silence. In fact, part of practicing silence is just listening to the world around you–whether it’s the crow cawing in my yard or the cars on the road or the dog barking at her nemesis, the mail carrier. Part of silence is also listening to your own body as well as to your inner self. What do you feel and where do you feel it? I tend to be in my head–thinking, analyzing, planning, worrying–so it’s a good practice for me to remember that I inhabit a body and check in with it. (My spiritual director is always asking me what I’m feeling or what emotion I’m experiencing, and it surprises me how often I simply don’t know.)

Silence in my house is good, while I’m doing tasks or, even better, not doing anything at all. I find silence outside to be even better.

Where do you find this silence in your day? Is it something you fit in naturally or something you have to carefully plan? Although the practice of silence does become a habit over time, I find that I do have to plan it and constantly reevaluate to make sure I am making the time for it. I still need to remind myself to turn off the music or the podcast when I’m walking the dog or watering the plants. (And silence doesn’t work for everything for me. I still can’t run without listening to music and for those of you who can, good for you and I don’t want to hear about it.)

Maybe you’re not someone who enjoys solitude and are instead energized by being around other people. You might wonder why you need solitude at all. To you, Nouwen might offer a gentle reminder that solitude is essential to community because if we cannot listen to our inner selves then we ask too much of others. For introverts and extroverts alike, if we don’t have a sense of comfort with our own inner selves, we become too needy. (Again, I say, “Ouch.”)

How are you listening to your inner self today?

The post Solitude or Loneliness? first appeared on Julia Roller.

I have always been a reader.

In first grade I got caught hiding a novel behind my math book. (In retrospect, that moment was quite accurate foreshadowing of my academic future.) I was infamous in my family for riding my bike around the neighborhood while reading a book. There is a picture of me on spring break in Florida when I was in college, wearing hideous heart-shaped sunglasses and walking laps in the pool with a paperback held right up to my face. When I was pregnant with my first child, one of the most dire predictions I heard about motherhood was that I would no longer have time to read. (That’s not true. You can still read, if you’re willing to ignore other things like, say, cleaning. It also turns out you can tuck a book right underneath one of those breastfeeding pillows.)

My identity as a reader has remained constant even as other parts of my identity have shifted: student, editor, author, daughter, wife, mom. I hope to always be a reader.

But sometimes I wonder if reading is actually good for me.

Let’s start with the take-no-prisoners way I read.

I read a lot of different kinds of books–fiction, non-fiction (particularly Christian), memoir–and I read all the formats: hard copies, eBooks, audio books. I usually have at least one book going in each one of these formats at a time. Not to mention the Sunday newspaper and the magazines that show up in my mailbox from publications I don’t even think I subscribe to. And we haven’t even gotten to the posts and articles I constantly read on my phone. According to Strength Finders, input is my #1 strength. What that means, at least for me, is that I want to read ALL the things, take in ALL the information, ALL the time. There’s not a room in my house that doesn’t have a book or a magazine or a device that allows me to read in some way. Most days I view the world as an exciting place filled with as of yet unread books. But on other days, my To Be Read book pile threatens to topple over and kill my small dog, and I feel exhausted by it all. The trouble is that with so many ways available to us to take in information, reading is no longer a break or a reward or an act of self-care but a never-ending constant. (Did I mention that I also read for a living?)

So far my eyes have held up just fine, but I really fear that all this reading is hurting my brain.

If you’d asked me a few years ago if there were any downsides to reading, I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with one. I firmly believed that reading was not only fun and diverting but also one of the best ways to connect with and understand more about God.

I still think that, but I’ve grown more aware of the way reading can become an idol, and even more important, the way that reading can serve as a way to avoid being alone with your own thoughts. It’s certainly one of my preferred escape mechanisms. And sometimes that can be completely appropriate and healthy, but where I get into trouble is when I realize I’m leaving no time for my thoughts. Reading becomes no longer a break but something I need a break from.

I’m working to implement a couple of things into my reading routine in order to ameliorate this situation. Not trying to cram reading (whether it’s on paper, audio, or app) into every second of the day helps me enjoy it more when I do take the time to read. One of my most pressing concerns in my spiritual life these days is simply protecting the silence so I can hear my own thoughts and listen to God. Sometimes I even picture this visually, as guardrails that I put up around certain times of the day to protect them from the overwhelming amount of input available to me at all times. Just because I can listen to a book or podcast while walking my dog doesn’t mean I should. Protecting the silence can mean putting down the book. Or the magazine. And definitely putting down the phone.

I also think about Dallas Willard’s words about how we are being constantly formed by who and what we surround ourselves with, whether we realize it or not. If everything I read is forming me, then I need to be deliberate about what I choose. For me, that looks like taking the occasional break from exhausting political news stories. (Has that ever been harder or more important than it is right now?) It also involves choosing my books more carefully.  In both fiction and non-fiction, I want to choose books that teach, uplift, or encourage. I think it’s also important to read books that challenge me. Only reading authors and ideas I already agree with isn’t great for spiritual formation either. C.S. Lewis wrote about how important it is to read old books, vowing to read two old books for every new one, not only because they challenge our current culture and understandings but also because they have been tested by the “clean sea breeze of the centuries.” This advice continues to challenge and ring true for me, particularly when it comes to Christian books.

So back to my question: Is reading bad for you? The answer is the most boring answer ever. Yes, anything can be bad for you if you do it too much and for the wrong reasons. I think it’s important to recognize the limitations of reading, just as everything in our lives that isn’t God has limitations and can become idolatrous. It is possible to read in a way that is bad for your spiritual formation, and it’s also possible to read too much. But of course that doesn’t mean reading is bad.

I still love reading, even though I would no longer dare to ride my bike around the neighborhood with a book in my hand. By being more deliberate about reading, by holding that part of my life up to the scrutiny of the Spirit just as I hope to hold up every other aspect of my life, I hope I can preserve not only the delight I have always found in it but also reading as a way to connect with God.

I’ll leave you with another favorite quote from C.S. Lewis, who must have been one of the world’s all-time greatest readers: “You’ll never find a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

Amen.

The post Is Reading Bad for You? first appeared on Julia Roller.

I’m fascinated by the Danish concept of hygge, especially at this time of year. Hygge (pronounced, as near as I can tell, HYOO-gah) is a bit of a complex idea, but I like to think of it as being contented in a cozy atmosphere. Hygge is often connected with winter, a time when people want to be warm and at home, to nest. I could honestly look at cozy home hygge pictures all day–soft blankets, lighted candles, fireplaces, warm drinks, those thick socks I can never have enough of.  (Go ahead–Google it! I’ll wait.)

I think another reason I like the idea of hygge is that it allows for a little bit of mess. I’ve always been a lot more attracted to a cozy, warm, welcoming home than to a home that looks like you shouldn’t sit on the sofas, no matter how clean and organized it is. (I’m sure those of you who have seen my home are not shocked to read this confession.)

Creating a cozy home also just doesn’t seem that hard, at least on the surface. Who can’t get some throw blankets and pillows and light a scented candle? But of course, these images are pointing at something much deeper–at our need for a place of safety, refuge, and renewal.

When I talked about hygge recently with my church MOPS group, we discussed the feelings and images evoked by our own childhood homes and what we would like our children to remember about our homes. For many moms, the way our children remember our homes feels like part of our legacy, and it should, considering the amount of time most of us spend trying to make our homes clean, organized, pretty, welcoming. etc. Warm, soft, cozy–these are all words I hope my children will think about when they think of our home.

I also noticed every single person in my group described her childhood home as being “safe.” That is a hygge idea too–home as a safe place or refuge where we can regain energy and courage. And that too is what I want most to offer my children–a place that is safe, a respite from the outside world when it all gets too much, a place where they can unabashedly be themselves. I think this is why the concept of warm and cozy appeals to us so much, even if we don’t live in a snowy part of the world. It makes us feel safe and cared for.

Hygge is also tied to the biblical idea of hospitality, something I am deeply interested in. Biblical hospitality can be summed up as welcoming and caring for guests, particularly strangers.  God programmed all of us with a deep need for safety and peace, and I believe part of God’s purpose for our lives is to help provide safety and peace for others. Hospitality is more about these ideas of welcoming and caring for than it is about the appearance of our home or the taste of our food. Yes, appearance and taste ARE part of creating a welcoming place where people feel cared for and happy. It feels good to be in a beautiful space eating delicious food, but no matter how lovely your home and how chef-quality your food, none of that matters if you are not welcoming and warm. Personally, I’d rather eat Chef Boyardee from a can with my friends than the finest food among people who are disdainful toward me or my family, no matter the setting.

Life with God is about so much more than how we look or how our homes look; it’s about how we are inside. And who we are inside is reflected in our homes–in the way they look and also in the way they feel to family and visitors alike.

As I told my MOPS moms, if our homes are loving, if WE are loving, reflecting as best we can the remarkable and astounding love God our Father has for us, I believe that’s what our children will remember most, NOT whether we burned the garlic bread (every.single.time) or had dusty bookshelves. (Not that those things bear any relevance to my house . . . obviously.)

In addition to simply doing our everyday Christian work of seeking to be more like Jesus, how can we intentionally make our homes places of contentment and safety?

One way is to set up guardrails around technology to let our children (and ourselves!) have a measure of freedom from the outside world. These can be small steps like we try to do in our house: no phones at the dinner table, charging your phones at night in a central location rather than bedrooms. The focus in our homes should be on each other rather than our screens. All the warm blankets, candles and roaring fireplaces in the world won’t help if my family is all staring at their individual devices.

Marie Tourell Soderberg takes this idea one step further in Hygge: The Danish Art of Happiness when she writes, “When you decorate your home, make room for charging stations–not only for your phone or computer, but for yourself and your family.” She suggests corners for these people charging stations, since corners also give us a feeling of being safe. Is this not brilliant? We are so obsessed with keeping our devices charged. What if we gave as much thought to keeping ourselves and our families charged? When I read her words, I knew immediately where my own family’s charging station was–the large, squashy sofa in the front room that is big enough for all five of us, is filled with blankets and probably too many pillows and, most important, is where our miniature dachshund likes to hang out, perched on the top of the sofa so she can monitor our comings and goings. Every single person in my house plops there at least once a day to relax, pet the dog, and occasionally receive a therapeutic licking.

Sometimes, all five (six, including the dog) of us recharge there at once.  And those moments represent another important way of creating the kind of home I want to have: focusing on shared time together. Eating dinner as a family, finding a movie that everyone wants to watch, playing games together. I know families whose favorite pastime is baking together, and others who love to hike or wakeboard together. (According to my hygge books, outdoor time together when the weather permits is also very hygge.) Whatever your family’s thing, I encourage you to be deliberate about making time for it or making actual space for it in your house if appropriate.

I wish you and your family many happy hygge moments of enjoying and recharging together.

Let me know: have you heard of hygge? If so, what do you think of it? And what is your family’s charging station? (Does it involve a dog?)

The post What Do You Want Your Home to Be? first appeared on Julia Roller.

When my kids were really small, I would sometimes fantasize about spending a night alone in a hotel. With a big bed all to myself, in which I could sleep for as long as I wanted. There were days I started to think prison didn’t sound all that bad. After all, you could curl up on your bunk and sleep all you wanted, right? (Yes, I do realize now that wasn’t the most realistic idea of prison…)

I’m no longer in the stage of life where I’m so desperate for sleep that prison seems appealing, but I still long for rest, and I still have an uneasy relationship with rest. I often write here about the busyness of life, but it’s harder to write about its corollary: resting.  I recently attended a writers’ retreat where rest was one of the themes. At least at first, it felt uncomfortable to think about deliberately resting when I was already doing something as indulgent as leaving my family for a weekend of writing workshops.

Why does the idea of rest sometimes make us feel guilty, like it’s something we have to explain or have an excuse to do?

I think we fear being perceived as lazy or non-achieving or, let’s face it, non-American.

Yet we all know that from the earliest pages of the Bible, God called us to rest and even set aside an entire day for us to do so, something we mostly like to ignore unless it’s convenient. When I first saw the movie “Chariots of Fire,” I was surprised at the runner who wasn’t willing to run on Sundays because of his faith. I wasn’t running any races on Sunday, but despite being a cradle Christian it honestly wouldn’t have occurred to me not to do so.

When I was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer several years ago when my daughter was a newborn, my friend Joanne described chemo as enforced “me time.” I was struck by her words. Now we would probably call it self-care. Chemotherapy as self-care! (Nobody’s written that women’s magazine article yet.) I thought about her words a lot during the months I was in active treatment. No one can say exactly why I got breast cancer, but I certainly wondered if my lack of rest and constant tiredness might have been a contributing factor. Here, now, was an opportunity to rest, and it felt okay for once to take it. With the incredible gift of my mother staying with us for much of my months of treatment, I was able to take naps and leisurely walks with my newborn in her snug wrap.  I rested (in a way I certainly hadn’t after the births of my two older children).

Now, years out from my cancer diagnosis, I still have this occasional struggle with whether resting is REALLY okay.

It is.

The rhythm of our lives is meant to contain times of rest. Intentional rest. Rest isn’t all we do, but it’s an important balance to the other rhythms of work and family life. And maybe it’s helpful if we talk about what rest might actually look like. It doesn’t have to mean napping, although I have no problem with napping. Ask any of my kids what inevitably happens after I read to them on the couch after school pickup. Sometimes I barely get through the book or the chapter before I conk out.

But rest is about renewal and recharging, and that can be more than simply sleep. In my life, I’ve come to recognize solitude and silence as key components of rest. If I don’t have time and space to be alone with my thoughts, I quickly start to feel frazzled and stressed. I’ve recognized that I need to carefully guard my times of silence, making sure I don’t always fill them with podcasts, playlists, and other silence-killers. Reading is also restful for me. Reading in my bathtub even more so.

And as one of our retreat speakers, Dorina Lazo Gilmore-Young, reminded us, rest isn’t always about being still. For me, exercise can be rest. Running or other exercise has always been calming for me. On days when my anxiety is high, I make sure to exercise, knowing that it will leave me feeling more calm and peaceful. It feels renewing in a different way than taking a nap. Maybe for you rest looks more like walking, hiking, knitting, or baking. Just as these repetitious activities can allow us space for prayer, particularly if we are intentional about it, they can also be forms of rest and renewal.

When do we rest? I think it’s important to try to have some form of rest every day, whatever that may look like to you. And for our family, Sunday can be a mutual time of rest and renewal.

I’m not always successful at setting Sunday aside. Despite all the sermons and even small group and book discussions I’ve heard over the years about the importance of remembering the Sabbath, I still sometimes view Sunday as a day to get to all the home projects and even catch up on a bit of work. As the mom of three kids who all play sports, sometimes on Sundays, I do find myself occasionally thinking about that Chariots of Fire guy. I don’t have a perfect answer to these ongoing conflicts, but I have realized that when we lose our Sunday morning breakfast and church routine to a soccer or baseball game, we need to make up with family time elsewhere (similar to the way pastors often take their Sabbath on Mondays).

Personally, my perfect Sunday is sleeping in, eating a leisurely breakfast that my husband would remind me to tell you he usually makes, going to 10:30 church, coming home to read on the couch with any kids who want to join me (this almost inevitably leads to a nap on the couch), going for a run, rewarding myself with a long bath (with a book, obviously), and then having dinner with friends. Of course, these things don’t all happen every Sunday. Sometimes, none of them do. But all of those things are forms of rest, and they all renew me in their own ways.

What does rest look like in your life? How are you making sure to allow for rest in this busy time?

The post How to Rest (And Why You Need to) first appeared on Julia Roller.

Our country, apparently, is lonely.

More than one-fifth of Americans report often or always feeling lonely or socially isolated. As a Christian, I see it this way: God made us to be in community. I believe our very souls long for this community, and I see this need all around me, particularly in the young moms I serve as a MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) coordinator.

I vividly remember the loneliness I felt as a new mom, alone in my house in a new town with an unhappy newborn. Being a mom of young children is a firsthand lesson in how you can be lonely without actually being alone. (Ever.)

My life improved greatly when I finally made some friends with other moms through my local Stroller Strides group, in addition to Bible studies and MOPS. Over the years, I’ve relied heavily on those friendships. Nothing feels as validating as sharing your parenting struggle with someone else who has experienced the same thing and can commiserate. I’ve noticed that many of my closest friends have children the same age as my oldest or, in some cases, my oldest two children. This experience seems typical, at least from my limited observation. You automatically have a great deal of things in common with someone whose child is a close friend of your child. Some of my earliest friendships were similarly based on proximity or commonalities–most of my best friends from college lived on the same freshman dorm floor as I did, for example.

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve had times in my life where multiple friendships sprang up easily and also barren times when friends felt few and far between. I have suffered and grieved when friendships ended or didn’t materialize as hoped. I have grown to understand that some friendships are short-lived, and that doesn’t mean they weren’t real or meaningful. (This is often true of mom friendships.) But it also makes me wonder what will happen to some of my current friendships when our kids grow up and move out. Are our connections based on more than our kids’ shared interests?

Frankly, I didn’t expect to still be uncertain about friendships at this point in my life. Isn’t that something I’m supposed to be instead helping my 7-year-old daughter through?

The truth is she doesn’t need any help right now. She’s at the age where she effortlessly becomes new best friends with anyone we encounter who is roughly her age, at the park, at the pool, at the airport. . . As someone who would rather stick flaming bamboo shoots under my fingernails than strike up a casual conversation with someone new in a social setting, I often marvel at her ease with it all.

And why isn’t it so easy with me? Beyond my garden-variety introversion, I often don’t really want to become friends with just anybody who looks like they’re about my age. I don’t want to be rejected; I don’t want to put in the work and effort of beginning and maintaining a friendship. I am too busy, too tired, too everything. And so I stick my head in my phone or stand by myself or otherwise pass up opportunities for connection. That particular tendency has worsened for me since Covid. I’m one of those weirdos who genuinely likes staying home, and Covid offered all kinds of permission to do so. And after all that mostly wonderful home time, venturing out into the cold, cruel, social world sounds even less appealing.

And yet…even I have a deep-seated longing for connection. So what do I do?

One way to answer this longing is investing in some of the friendships I already have. It doesn’t take long to send a text to someone and check in on them, to set up a lunch or a walk or invite someone over. For me, one-on-one is generally more fun than a large group, but even I enjoy the right large group at times. As my husband often reminds me, no matter how much I don’t want to go to whatever the thing is, when I do go, usually I have fun.

So keeping that in mind, I also try hard to say yes even when my first instinct is to say no. Not yes to everything, but not no to everything either.

I also must consider the deeper roots of my longing for connection. It doesn’t seem to me to be coincidence that people are reporting feeling more lonely at the same time church attendance is declining. For me, sitting in the pews of my church conveys a powerful feeling of belonging and being home. If I didn’t have that, I shudder to think what my life would be like.

Friendships, even meaningful ones, can come and go, but what’s not temporary or short-lived is the Church, although pastors, fellow parishioners, and even the particular place we call our home church may transition. In that key way, community differs from friendship. I believe we need both–meaningful friendships and a community that feels like home.

If my daughter reaches a time when friendship isn’t quite so effortless, and sadly, I suspect she will, I hope to be able to point her to the community of our church and hope that it is a place that feels like home for her.

For you and for your family, is your church the place where you find community? Let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

The post Friendship for the Rest of Us first appeared on Julia Roller.

(Especially When You’re Crazy Busy)

The end of the school year is just nuts. Band concerts, graduations, open houses, baseball playoffs, soccer tournaments, award ceremonies, end-of-year banquets, teacher appreciation…all at the same time. Not to mention that you’re also expected to make food to bring to many of these events. Just looking at the week ahead is enough to make me feel dizzy.

Out of desperation and necessity, my husband and I have figured out a way to deal with all of these commitments. We figure it out the day before. Not two days or a week before, but 24 hours. I mean, I put all the commitments into my calendar but we don’t actually figure out who goes where and who needs a ride and what we need to cancel until the night before.

If you’d asked me before we started this practice, I would likely have predicted that such a strategy would leave me awash in anxiety. What will happen on Friday? How will I get three kids to three separate places at the same time? And what about SATURDAY, where we’re all double-booked???

But the opposite is true. Instead of increasing my anxiety about the future, this strategy allows me to just focus on the day at hand.

I wish I’d figured this out years ago. If you’ve ever heard me speak, you probably know that my favorite passage for moms is Matthew 6:25-34, which can be summed up in three words: Do not worry. In verse 34, Jesus says specifically, “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

I have tried (really I have!) but never been very successful at actually living these words. What is a mom for if not to worry about tomorrow? My worries are many and varied, although, I’m certain, not unique. Most center around my children. And getting them to all their dang activities is probably the least important but the most pressing on a daily basis. It takes up a tremendous amount of headspace.

So imagine my surprise when a hundred new things crashed onto our schedule and the end result was that I worried about it all less.

One of the things I like about our 24-hours ahead plan is that it also frees up some space for me not only to appreciate the day we’re in but also to feel a sense of accomplishment. I brought the teacher a nice card my daughter drew (even if it wasn’t on the right day of teacher appreciation week). I got my son to his baseball game early (maybe not by his standards, which would probably be the day before the game, but early by anyone else’s). Everyone got fed (and so what if half of those meals were from the baseball snack shack?). Those things are not nothing.

I know that all of a sudden we’ll slam into summer and most of these events will slide off the calendar and leave us with a much more relaxed schedule again. But I’m going to try to stick with the 24-hour rule as much as possible. Summer is a good time for spontaneity, and more importantly, I want to keep us with this practice of appreciating the day I’m living.

Tomorrow will bring worries of its own, yes, but that’s for tomorrow.

Moms tend to be preoccupied with time. Or more precisely, with time management. The moms in the MOPS group I coordinate ask for a time management speaker every semester, worried by the way the days seem to stretch out forever yet also mysteriously elapse while they’re changing diapers and administering snacks, often leaving them feeling like they are accomplishing very little.

My kids are all out of the diaper phase, but I worry about time too. I want to spend my time wisely and productively, and I have a near-constant sinking feeling that I am wasting too much of it. Motherhood seems to have exacerbated in me a sense that I should be more productive than I am. I’m not alone in this feeling, I know. Everywhere we look there seems to be tips on how to do more, sleep less, create better habits, make the most of everything—all offered by people who seem to be doing all of these things better than we are. The hidden message in all of this is that not only should we be more productive, but that productivity is the goal of life.

This feeling presents a particular challenge since I’m currently in what I think of as my chauffeur phase of life, where it seems like I’m always hopping in my car to drive one of my three kids somewhere or pick up another one from somewhere. Three kids, three different schools, multiple sports and activities. Many days I feel like an unpaid Uber driver.

On most weekday mornings I look at my schedule for the day and realize I’m going to spend most of it in my car, again, traversing the streets of my town. All of these little repeated back-and-forths can feel like wasted time, time that could be better spent doing something “productive.” So I’m often tempted to try to double up so I can feel more useful—taking work calls or listening to a podcast or an audiobook while I’m driving, for example. Or even worse, I spend my little drives frantically going over all the “important” things I need to do as soon as I’m done with this unimportant duty. That never fails to make me feel scattered and anxious rather than productive. As I tell my MOPS moms but sometimes fail to remember myself, multi-tasking generally leads to performing all the tasks poorly, at least in my experience, despite what we like to think about it being a particular mom superpower.

In How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell points out that most of us are whipped up into “a permanent state of frenzy” by all the various forms of media competing for our attention. It’s no wonder we often feel frantic about the way we’re spending our time. I find Odell’s book a good corrective to our national obsession with productivity.

In response to the cultural pressure to do more and more, she encourages her readers to “do nothing,” which she describes as “refusing productivity and stopping to listen” (p. 22). Although I don’t believe Jenny Odell identifies as a Christian, she has a Christian sensibility. Proverbs 31 woman aside, there’s not a lot of productivity inspo in the Bible. In fact, I think if we examine our deep desires to be productive or considered productive by others (and therefore successful), I don’t think we would find a lot of Jesus there.

The way Jesus spent his time as recorded in the Bible was hardly what most of us today would consider productive—wandering, teaching, eating, spending time alone and with friends, telling lots and lots of stories. Henri Nouwen referred to prayer as wasting time with God, and I think many spiritual practices can be characterized this way.

Odell’s answer to rejecting the siren song of productivity is simply to pay attention, something many of us pay lip service to but struggle to actually practice. At least I do. Yet I’ve also grown to recognize the value of paying attention to the moments in my many drives with my children. I’ve long believed that the best way to get a boy to open up to you is to put him in a car next to you, where you’re together but not looking at each other. It works on my seven-year-old daughter too, although truth be told, it’s not a great challenge to get her to talk.

Because two of my three are old enough to stay home by themselves or watch their little sister, I get lots of opportunities to be alone with each of them in the car, as we’re driving to school dropoff or soccer practice or batting lessons. It’s become increasingly clear to me what a gift this is.  I would never trade my son’s opening up about what is making him anxious at school, my daughter’s cheerful retelling of all the recess antics, or my other son’s musings about his latest selections on Spotify.

There’s nothing particularly productive about any of these conversations, but yet I treasure them. As my children grow up and it becomes more clear how limited my time with them actually is, these little interludes in the car feel more and more precious. Viewed through this lens, these short drives no longer feel like wasted time. They feel instead like they might be the best possible use of my time.

So I continue to work on this concept of paying attention rather than being productive. Rather than obsessing over what I should be doing, what I could be doing, or what I didn’t do, I notice what is going on around me, who is in the car with me, what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, and how I am feeling. One of the many benefits of this practice is that it’s very difficult to be anxious when you’re paying attention, when you’re in the moment, because anxiety lives almost exclusively in what happened in the past, or what you fear could happen in the future. It very rarely exists in what is actually happening right now.

I’m sure tomorrow I’ll be playing a podcast and fretting over my to-do list at some point when I’m performing my chauffeur duties, but my hope is that I’ll catch myself, turn off all the other stuff, and give that time instead to being in the present with my passenger, open to all the possibilities that it might bring. I hope that for you too.

This article first appeared in the Redbud Post.

It should have been a mother’s dream. As I lay in my bed with a book, I could hear my husband starting dinner preparations and marshaling the kids into peeling shrimp, chopping vegetables, and setting the table.

I should have been relaxing and enjoying the fact that other people were making dinner–not to mention the fact that they were going to deliver it to me when it was done, but I just couldn’t do it. I was absolutely bursting with helpful suggestions. I called my younger son on the landline to give him a little participation pep talk and direct him to go outside and pick a lemon from the tree. I called my older son on his cell phone to tell him there was some ready-to-bake bread from Trader Joe’s and zucchini in the fridge. My exasperated husband finally hung up on me. Even I had to laugh at myself.

I guess it is indeed possible to make dinner without me.

I had Covid (thankfully, a very mild case) and I was the only sick one in my family (also thankfully), so for the better part of a week I was alone in my room listening to family life going on without me. It was a bit weird. I mean, it wasn’t awful to stay in bed and watch Netflix and read and grudgingly do a little work, but I felt terrible about all the slack my husband was having to pick up in my absence, and I was worried the rest of the family would get sick too.

Being sick and being a mom don’t seem to mesh all that well. The first night I felt sick I was curled up on the sofa, wrapped in blankets and looking in dismay at the thermometer, when my younger son, wearing a hopeful expression, brought over his math homework. My first instinct was to stick my head under the blanket like a turtle retreating into her shell. “I cannot help with math homework right now!” I told him. “I need two days to be sick. Just two days!” The truth is that I am not really good at junior high math homework when I’m feeling my best, but that night it just seemed impossible. Buddy, don’t you see I’m dying here?

It’s troublesome when the caretaker gets sick. Moms often feel like we don’t have the luxury of allowing ourselves to be sick because we’re the ones who make the family run. So instead of dedicating ourselves to resting and getting better, we immediately panic about how everything will possibly continue without us. Who will do the laundry? Who will remind my daughter to brush her hair and drive her to school? Who will make the lunches and check the backpacks and pick up the craft supplies for the volunteer project and pass out the boxes of orders from the elementary school fundraiser? Who will remember the zucchini??!!

You see, normally, I just do all this stuff anyway, even when I’m sick. But when you’re the only one in the family with Covid and you want to keep it that way, you have to stay in your room and hope everyone can manage.

This freedom from the usual tasks also gives you some time to think.

My spiritual director told me once that it’s hard to pay attention to God when you’re sick, and to some extent I think that’s true. An acute illness tends to stay front of mind as you worry about whether you should go to the doctor or the ER or if you will ever be able to lie down without coughing again. It’s hard to focus on the spirit when your body will not let you forget about it.

Yet I think there’s also a sort of spiritual awareness that comes along with recognizing the essential frailty of the body, whether you’re acutely ill with a bad cold and feel terrible but know that SOMEDAY you’ll feel better or whether you have a chronic diagnosis such as breast cancer where you’ve been told that something is badly wrong even though you feel fine. When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer 7 years ago, I thought that knowledge would be at the forefront of my thoughts forever. I’d be watching TV and laughing at something and all of a sudden I’d remember, “I have CANCER!” and the weight of that knowledge would settle heavily on me once again.  It wasn’t even just worrying about being sick and possibly dying that was always on my mind in those early days. It was worrying about how it would all affect my children. After all, I had a newborn baby and two young boys at the time. What if I was too sick to take care of them? What if I got so sick I could never take care of them again? Those were the thoughts that were never far from my mind.

But even those worries gradually abated. After some time (months, in my case) had passed, cancer (and the ways it could affect my family) was no longer my first thought upon waking and my last thought before falling asleep. It no longer felt like a dark cloud following me around like Olaf’s snow cloud in Frozen. One of the reasons I was able to able to focus less on my worries and troubling thoughts was that I grew increasingly better at seeing God with me even when it felt dark. And the way I felt God most closely when I was sick was in the care of those people around me.

Here’s some of what I learned from that experience.

First, taking care of yourself isn’t selfish. In fact, it can be the opposite of selfish. If I want to be here for my family, I need to rest when I’m sick and take better care of myself when I’m not. As much as self-care is a buzzword these days, I think deep down most moms believe that taking care of ourselves–prioritizing things like our own rest, exercise, and nutrition–is innately selfish. But how can it be? Think of this in terms of your family if that helps. In other words, if you’re the engine that makes your family run, then don’t you have to keep yourself in good condition?

And second, if you’re able to pay attention when you’re sick, you will see God everywhere. God was there during my cancer treatment in the dozens of people who cared for me medically but also in those who brought meals and baby gifts, who drove my kids to baseball practice, and watched the baby while I received radiation treatment. When I had Covid, God was there through my husband who drove my daughter to school and picked up my craft order for the volunteer event and passed out the Art to Remember gifts at the elementary school when I couldn’t. God was present when my husband and my kids made many dinners, even remembering the zucchini.

(Before we all get too carried away with how amazing my family is without me, though, allow me to point out that while I had Covid no one did any laundry at all. None. I’m not even going to tell you what my children were wearing when I emerged from isolation because their future spouses might read this one day. Let’s just say that I can rest assured that I’ll never be completely superfluous around here.)

But despite the little laundry hiccup (my husband has asked me to point out to you that he did in fact ask me if he should do laundry and I recoiled in horror and insisted that I would do it all when I was recovered and to be honest, that does sound like me), my family not only managed to take care of themselves while I was sick, they also took care of me because, for the most part, I let them.

It’s so hard for many of us to receive help, particularly moms. We are programmed to give rather than receive. Yet the care of others is one of the primary ways God demonstrates love and presence, and if you never allow anyone to help you, you are missing that. If your family is battling sickness this season, try to accept help if it’s offered. And do what you can to take care of yourself. Rest is important for all of us. Make yourself actually do what you tell your kids to do when they’re sick. The kids will be fine.

Last week my 7-year-old daughter made a sign, “Don’t come in, Luke and Ben!” (Luke and Ben are her brothers), hung it on my door, and disappeared inside my bedroom to wrap Christmas presents, emerging later with several wrapped presents–some for her brothers and her dad and two for her stuffed bunnies. She’d done the same thing earlier that week for birthday parties for her friends, “wrapping” all the gifts she’d picked out in paper shopping bags and stuffing them with tissue paper left over from her own birthday party before I even knew what was happening. I wanted to encourage her to re-wrap the gifts in new gift bags (or at least in gift bags that were meant to be used as gift bags!), but she was so excited and proud of herself I didn’t have the heart to do it.

Then last night I told her we were going to deliver some holiday cookies to a few friends and neighbors, and she dressed up in full elf costume–Santa hat, blinking ornament necklace, warm boots. (She was terribly disappointed I didn’t have any pointy-toed elf boots she could wear.) She loaded all the packages into a red tote “Santa” bag, which she carried up to every door before introducing herself as the elf, her brother Luke as Santa, and me as Rudolph (I was the driver, you see, and lucky to get away without branches strapped to my head for antlers). When we got home, she told me it was the most fun she’d ever had.

I have suspected for some time that gifts was her love language, and now I feel pretty certain of it.

I imagine you’re probably familiar with the love languages. This concept has been running around churches for decades. According to Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages, your love language is the way you give and receive love. The five different types are quality time, physical affection, acts of service, gifts, and words of affirmation.

From the first time I encountered this idea, I remember thinking that “gifts” was a terrible love language! How selfish to want to receive and give gifts, even small ones, to show and receive love. I decided my love language was quality time and left it at that. But in recent years, I’ve been coming around to the realization that if gifts aren’t my primary love language, they rank pretty high for me. Just like my daughter. And that it’s not such a terrible love language to have.

I do like to receive gifts, but I really love to give them, especially at Christmastime. I truly enjoy picking out gifts I think my friends and family would like. I even like wrapping them. I have an app on my phone that helps me track all my Christmas gifts, and I am delighted when it’s time to open it up and start using it.

I certainly agree with the ubiquitous commentary that Christmas has become too materialistic. I don’t think anyone needs to buy a gift for every person they encounter or every relative. And I do not particularly enjoy going to the toy section at Target with my daughter at Christmastime and hearing her extensive and expensive list of all the things she would like to get.

And yet, I’m still going to pick out some gifts for her that I think (I hope) she will like. I’m going to wrap them and put them under the Christmas tree, and I am going to LOVE watching her open them up.

Gifts aren’t all there is to Christmas by any means, but I find them an enjoyable and meaningful part of celebrating Jesus’ birthday. The gifts the wise men brought to Jesus weren’t the most practical gifts ever–they weren’t baby clothes or baby toys or food. The gold, frankincense, and myrrh were extravagant, generous gifts with great significance, gifts that recognized Jesus as holy, Jesus as king. They were gifts those men brought to honor who Jesus was.

I like to talk to my kids about exchanging gifts in honor of Jesus’ birthday, a birthday so special that we all get presents! And I like to try to honor those first gifts by carefully choosing presents that honor the person I am buying for and also by trying to be as generous as I can.

You’re probably familiar with the O. Henry story The Gift of the Magi. In this story, a young wife sells her long hair to buy a chain for her husband’s prize pocket watch, and he sells that same watch to buy her a comb for her beautiful hair. The point of the story isn’t the ultimate futility of their gifts or that they shouldn’t have bothered. To me the story is about generosity and the point is that they were each willing to sacrifice something to make the other happy. I’ve never had to make a sacrifice on that level, but one of the things I appreciate about Christmas gift-giving is the little economies I try to make in order to be able to buy gifts–eating out less, spending less money on myself, even the practice of picking things out for other people that I would really like to receive.

I don’t always succeed at this. I was choosing a present for a friend the other day from my gift shelf (yes, I have a gift shelf!), and I know she loves candles that smell like food. I had a carrot cake scented candle that I thought she would probably like, but I had bought that candle for myself and just put it on my “gift shelf” until I was ready to use it. And because I had chosen some other things for her already, I kept it. Half an hour later at church, our pastor gave a sermon about generosity, and I wanted to run back home and get that candle and give it to her! Instead, I’ve tried to keep that experience in mind as I do the rest of my gift shopping this Christmas season, remembering the feeling of giving someone something they truly like and how much better that is than the feeling I had that day in the pews about my candle still at home on my shelf.

For my daughter, I’ve been trying to encourage her natural generosity by taking her to Target not to expand her own list but to help me choose gifts for the various toy drives all around us this time of year.  And letting her decorate her present for her first-grade teacher just how she wanted. After all, who says you can’t have a bow on the bottom of the gift? When she’s older, I look forward to volunteering with her at one of the local “toy stores” where we help military families pick out donated toys for their families, as I have with my sons. I’ll even wear antlers if she really wants me to.

For those of you who love gift-giving and consider gifts your love language, have at it! Enjoy this part of the Christmas season! And for those of you who would rather stick a chopstick in your eye than pick out one more gift, I hear you and I want to remind you that just about everyone I know loves gift cards.

Merry Christmas!