The Fruit of Self-Care

The Fruit of Self-Care

In our Living Your Word of the Year group we have been pondering weekly questions to help us connect with our word of the year in order to make it an active part of our lives. This week our question is:

How can you nurture your word with self-care this week?

We can thank Valerie Sjodin for these great weekly questions.  :)

My word for 2020 is fruit. The quote that describes my intention for selecting this word is by Dallas Willard:

"If you tend to the tree, the fruit will take care of itself."

For me, a large part of "tending to the tree" is about self-care practices. Fruit is the by-product of something else. Spiritually, it is the by-product of the Holy Spirit's work in our lives. He enables us to position ourselves before the Father for transformation. Spiritual practices or disciplines help us in this positioning, they help us live the life of the Spirit.

Self-care can be a loaded term in some circles. Some may see it as selfish or being self-indulgent. Others may have the view that it is a time waster, something only those who have a lot of extra time on their hands can indulge in. Whatever your view of self-care may be, I hope you'll indulge me in sharing my thoughts on the subject. 

In my own journey, embracing self-care came out of a time in my life when I was experiencing burn-out. I had worked in ministry for quite a few years - the same ministry I work in now - and I was struggling with feeling worn out, having no energy, constantly emotional, and not seeing how I could continue to pour out myself in outreach ministry for much longer. I was running on empty and it felt like the only solution to my problem was to quit my job. I am not going to go too much into the details here, but I ended up not quitting my job, and over the course of a few years of reading, studying the Bible, and talking with a few trusted friends, I found the answer to my burn-out issues was in self-care.

One of my foundational passages of Scripture for self-care is Mark 12:28-31.

"One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” "

Jesus says that loving God and loving our neighbor/others are the most important commandments. Yet this verse also makes an assumption: that you are already loving yourself. Not loving yourself in an unhealthy manner that is self-absorbent or verges on narcissism, but in a manner that is healthy and good, and that out of that place you will love your neighbor/others in the same manner. To me loving yourself is about self-care. It's about taking care of yourself in ways that keep you healthy emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually so that you can be your best for others. Jesus modeled this when he withdrew and sought solitude, rest and time for prayer. He even did this at the expense of not serving others needs at times. He taught it and modeled it to His disciples. He was so in tune with His Father and the Father's will that he was able to discern when it was time for self-care and when it was time for caring for others. 

Over the past years I have used this verse as a guideline when determining my intentions or goals with my word for the year. Jesus is calling us to love God with our whole being:

• With all our heart - this is our emotional health. Often burn-out has more to do with a loss of emotional energy than physical. So what habits and activities help restore my emotional energy? How can I make time for these activities in order to fill up what has been drained?
• With all our soul - this is our spiritual health. How am I regularly drawing closer to God? What practices can I put into place that deepen my relationship with Him and that help create spiritual health?
• With all my mind - this is our mental health. What am I doing to keep my brain healthy? How can I keep learning and growing? What practices need to be in place?
• With all my strength - this is our physical health. Being physically healthy helps all of the other areas of our health. What practices do I need to put into place to eat well, to exercise, to insure good sleep? What practices do I need to eliminate that cause my body to be unhealthy?

The other passage for self-care that is important to me offers Jesus' prescription:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30

Self-care is about resting in Jesus and learning from Him. But that's a message for another day!

This week think about your intentions and goals for your word of the year and ponder this:

What am I doing to care for my heart? For my soul? For my mind? For my strength? What am I doing to grow healthier in these areas, so that I may love God with my whole being and love my neighbor/others well? 

(Complete with a pen slip-up!)

"When I stop and rest, I can fill up and that enables me to pour out." ~Sunshyne Gray

Join us in the Living Your Word Community

My friends Bernice Hopper, and Valerie Sjodin, and I share insights through blog posts for creatively living a word of the year. In our Facebook group, we encourage one another by posting questions and prompts to inspire living out a word focus, keeping a journal etc. It is a safe place to ask for prayer and support. If you would like to connect with others in creative ways about living your word, you can ask to join our Living Your Word of the Year 2020 by clicking on the link below.

URL for Facebook group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/livingyourwordoftheyear/ 

Hashtag for Instagram:  #livingyourword2020

Check out their blogs:

Bernice: https://newlycreative.com

Valerie: https://valeriesjodin.com/blog/ 

Advent, Sacred Time and My One Little Word

For the past few weeks I have been preparing for my annual Advent art project. An art project during the Advent season is a practice I started six years ago as a way to redeem the Christmas season. There were a few reasons why I needed to redeem this season for myself. First, I had worked in the hospitality and retail industries for 25 years. These industries make a good portion of their income off of the Christmas season so they spend a lot of time marketing it and doing so well in advance of the actual holiday. After years of having Christmas carols and decorations beginning 6-8 weeks in advance, by the time the actual holiday came along I was anything but in the holiday spirit. It took a number of years after I left those industries in 2002 to begin to even have a desire to embrace the Christmas season, and when I did I didn't want it to be in the materialistic manner our culture tends to promote. At about the same time our church began adding an Advent moment into the service. Enter the Advent art project. That year (2011) two things took place: I started my first Advent art project as a way to slow down and dig into the meaning and the story of the season. The second thing that took place was the start of this blog on December 26, 2011. I published the following quote on my first blog post:

“…To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity.”  Creating art is taking Love, Truth, the spiritual, and making them ‘in carne’–in the flesh.  Creating art is taking Love, Truth, the spiritual, and incarnating them that we might see them and experience them more clearly.

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking On Water: Reflections On Faith and Art

This quote about art being incarnational really sums up the role art journaling has played in redeeming the Christmas season for me over the past six years. Each year as I have expressed the various Scripture passages or quotes or hymn and songs through art and in writing on this blog, the deeper meanings of Advent and looking ahead to the coming of Christ have worn away the cynical and tired parts of my heart and soul..

As I said, there were a few reasons the Christmas season needed to be redeemed for me. The other reason is that for most of my life I have had an aversion to traditions. Traditions, such as observing holidays, usually did not go well in the dysfunctional family of my childhood. In fact, more times than not they ended up in chaos and pain. The other traditions we observed in my childhood were those of the Catholic church. This church was not a place of compassion and support for my mother as she went through the struggles of alcohol abuse with my dad and subsequently a divorce in my early teen years. Once I began my own faith journey in my late twenties I found myself angry with the Catholic church and its rituals which I felt were empty and hypocritical. - Please don't let me offend anyone who is Catholic, this is just a part of MY story.-  I don't want to dwell on or dig too deeply into my issues with traditions or the Catholic church, because over the past 28 years since I became a Christ-follower God has slowly been about His work of redemption. Redemption is God's story. He redeems people to Himself through Christ and then begins the lifelong process of redeeming the hurts and trials and false perceptions that exist within us.

~ Redemption is God's story.

So, now, this all leads me to where I am today. We are coming to the close of another year and the start of the Advent season is just a week away. Over the past few weeks as I have been planning for this year's Advent art project and reflecting on how this practice has been so redemptive for me, I began to wonder if the same could be true on a larger scale. You see, in addition to the above mentioned issues I had regarding the Christmas season, I have also avoided participating in many of the other "Christian" traditions, such as Lent. In part because historically many Evangelical churches have not observed the Christian calendar for the most part, with the exception of Christmas and Easter. But I think, for me, there has been other issues from my childhood connected to these days/holidays as well. So as I was reflecting on this my friend, Jean, showed me the picture of a n artistic liturgical calendar, mainly for its artistic value. Jean has a heart for the liturgical and has played a huge role in our church connecting with some of the traditions that have not been observed in the past, such as Advent and Lent. Jean has been very understanding of my feelings about these traditions and has never been one to push me outside of any comfort zones I was uncomfortable with leaving. She has been my traveling companion as I have embraced Advent. When she showed me the liturgical calendar I was struck with the thought that maybe if I journeyed through the rest of the Christian calendar in the same manner I have with Advent, I may experience redemption and healing in other ways as well.

This year, 2018, I am going to change my annual practice (um, tradition) of picking a word for the year and instead I am going to pick a phrase: Sacred Time. I am going to travel through the Christian calendar year and art journal and blog my way through it. Even as I think about this, it doesn't seem too foreign to me. After all, a calendar simply marks the cycle of rhythms or seasons. And I have found the rhythms of Sabbath and spiritual practices to be very healthy and formative habits in my life. I am setting my word/phrase for 2018 now, since one of the first things I have learned in reading about the Christian calendar is that Advent is the beginning of the Christian year.

I wrote about my Advent art journal project for this year in my last post, which you can read here. I have put together a project called Advent Words which will be live on my blog on December 1st. There will be a word for each day of Advent with some accompanying Scripture passages which can be used as a prompt for art journaling, photography, poetry, or any other creative form. 

Join me! We have already begun the conversation in the Advent Words 2017 Facebook Group.