sometimes going forward looks like going back

when goals and timing conflict with each other

Hey friends,

It’s officially fall here! New notebooks, fresh pencils, wool blankets, and an ambitious list of irrational projects that we’ll probably only accomplish a fraction of! Yay yay yay!!

Record scratch, yeah.

It’s a good time to reevaluate though, right? Fall is like a different type of New Year as we look at the winter and assess the next long season ahead — are we ready? Are we stocked up for winter? Are we scheduling the right things, and still leaving room for unpredictability?

It’s probably been ingrained to us since childhood from years of gearing up for the first days and weeks of school. (Remember when they used to always start in September? Those were the days.) But now we do the grown-up version: What will we learn this year? Who will we invest our time in? What projects will we take on?

And then, to be fair to ourselves, we have to ask a harder, more wet-blankety question: What will I let go of, so I have the margin to do those new things?

Womp, womp.

Earlier this month I was getting ready for my podcast, and I realized I was dreading it. Not only that, but I realized I had been dreading it every week for a while, and what used to bring joy and a sense of accomplishment and movement forward just left me feeling frustrated and out of sorts every time I did it. It required a full day every week, 20% of my work time, and it was getting pretty obvious (to me, at least) that there were other things I could be doing to steward that time better.

And maybe I was overthinking it (I’ll overthink that, too, and get back you) but here’s the dilemma I was trying to figure out: Is this just attack and resistance, and I should push through and keep going? Or is this the Holy Spirit telling me it’s time to be done, and move on to something else?

I prayed it through with the honest words — not the fake, good-sounding ones, but the ones that expressed all my conflicting feelings. And then I talked to my husband. And then, all of a sudden, there was freedom — freedom to quit and move on, freedom to let go of it, and freedom to devote that day of the week to doing what I really felt like I was supposed to be doing, which is writing a book (more on that in a minute).

It’s not what I expected, and that is okay. Over the last few years I am learning that when things aren’t the way we expected or planned them to be but we still have peace (and even excitement) over it, that’s a sure sign the Lord is doing the directing, and not us.