Life, blogging, simplifying, prioritizing

I just read (skimmed) a post titled "To Be More Joyful: Simplify Your Life". This is something I have known for years, but struggle to do. From at least the time I subscribed to FLYLady for a while (at least 6 years ago or more), to the occasional book or article on the topic, there are frequent reminders of this in my life. Hopefully there will be an opportunity for me to study this article and the corresponding links more carefully, as the lack of simplicity, or at least prioritizing, in my life, is causing my brain to be on overload and to lose various items of information like a sieve. One activity we jumped into, and I do think will be valuable in the future is a local 4-H club. But it got off to a late start and for us to complete the projects in time is going to be stressful, if not impossible. So that is my first area to drop, that will be one less plate to try and keep spinning for the next two months. And we can still enter projects in the county fair open show if we want, but with less strings attached to doing so. Simplicity would also be greatly enhanced by cutting back further on computer time. (I have cut back significantly on Facebook time - increasing privacy concerns, plus a growing boredom with it - helped. But replaced some of that wasted time with reading blogs, which can be inspiring, but also adds to my brain overload as all the fun projects I want to try pile up from blog to blog!)

Though the Christian faith is not a part of this article on "balance", the idea communicated in it is one that has floated around in my brain a bit in a much more fragmented form recently. Isn't it so that those who accomplish great things are often more "unbalanced" believers as well? We just finished reading the biography of Mary Slessor - definitely an unbalanced life that was so effective and had such an impact. (This was one of our school books this year, and though I've read many missionary biographies, I had never learned about this woman. The kids enjoyed this book.)

And here's a short, but thoughtful post on "relaxing vs. refreshing". What truly refreshes you? This is a list I need to make, and will try to share when possible.

Yesterday as part of the sermon on Jonah 2, we were challenged to write our own Psalm, which I would like to do as well.

Last night I spent a few minutes writing out the things we ARE doing this summer, followed by a list of the things I would like to do this summer. While the travels we do in the summer are always good and time well-spent, there is a corresponding trade off of activities that there aren't time for as a result, or not as much time as there could be for, such as planning our school year.