The gift of a snow day...

There are twenty inches of snow outside my front door as I write, give or take a few inches. It doesn’t sound very grown-up to admit it, but I hope it snows again tonight.  I do. With the snow, comes a pause. We are six weeks into this new year. I’ve been diligent and disciplined, carefully planning my time and dutifully working the plan. Those are good things. But a snow day or two? A chance to dissolve a bit into an unforced rhythm, to cease striving and just be? That’s a gift.

I live in the suburbs of a city that works harder, works faster, works more. A city of ambition and jostling and seeking a place, its vibe is one of always looking to climb higher. There is an energy about this city that can be felt far into the reaches of its bedroom suburbs. Do more, Be more. Know more. Seek more.

But what if you live here and you love Jesus? What does that mean? How does that look? It means that we need a snow day every once in awhile to remind us that He called us to abide in Him, He asks us to shoulder His burden, the one that is easy and light. He said that if we are weary, He will give us true rest.

And twenty inches of snow, thereby canceling every outside obligation so that I can catch my breath and inhale deeply of the pause.

Of course, snow is not rest for everyone. I have a friend who owns a company that works to remove all that snow from streets and sidewalks. She hasn’t slept in three days and would likely throw an empty coffee mug at me if I suggested that snow days are God-given rest days. It’s not the snow that’s the point; it’s the pause.

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

God wants us to pause. He wants us to take a deep a breath and sink into His rhythm for life. He wants to remind us that the race is won. He won it. We don’t have to push harder and further and faster to fall into step with Him. He’s not racing away to the next thing. He’s here. He’s always been here. He’ll always be here.

The gentle truth of the gospel is that it blankets us, envelopes us in a peace of recollected calm. But we must be still to know God. The stillness? The organic rhythm that comes with living entirely in His grace? It’s not just for snow days.

It’s for Mondays and election days and humid days in July when the heat index is over one hundred. God calls us to walk with Him, unburdened, every day. He says that if we are grafted onto Him and we allow Him to nourish us as the vine nourishes the branches, we will thrive. He wants us to sit with Him, to match our breath to His, to be like Him. He didn’t fill his days with the busyness of striving.  He filed His days with wholeheartedly loving.

When we drink deeply of His presence, we begin to understand what He would have us do. When we fall head over heels for God, that love spills out into our daily lives and love begins to be the mission. Love is what fuels our days. Love creates peace in our lives where once there was the frantic pursuit of self. We don’t find self—the self we were truly created to be—by running hard after it. We find self when we let God animate our days and we trust Him to direct our paths. We find self when we are still and quiet with God.

Quick! Hurry! Here's a Craft Kit Giveaway before Lent Begins

 Today it's my pleasure to introduce you to Kristin from Kristin's Crafts for Kids. She has a giveaway for you just in time for Lent. Visit her shop, look around, leave a comment telling us what you liked there and you will be entered to win a free lenten craft kit! "Like" Kristin's Crafts for Kids On Facebook, and you can enter yourself again. Since Ash Wednesday is only 8 days away, we'll announce the winner of this giveaway this Thursday evening. So hurry!

How did your business come to be?

Starting Kristin’s Crafts for Kids was not planned.  If fact, starting a business wasn’t  a consideration until the Holy Spirit dropped the opportunity in my lap.  In early November 2013, I was browsing a homeschooling forum and someone mentioned that she was looking for someone who sold pre-packaged craft kits.  After looking into what was available, I decided this was a niche that I could fill, so the day before Thanksgiving, I shipped my first orders out. 

 

What is the product that you are most excited about?

I just finished the Lenten craft kit.  I am very excited to work through in with my own children.  There are 12 crafts with a couple that are to be done throughout Lent, one to go with each Sunday of Lent and several for Holy Week.  For my family, I think the activities will enrich our Lenten experience to make it something beyond what we have to “give up.”

Any plans for your business that you’d like to share?

Kristin’s Crafts for Kids is so new right now that I’m focusing on the kits for monthly holiday and fun days, quarterly saints and feast days and the liturgical year.  Once I get that established, I plan to add a wide variety of single purchase kits.  I hope to add kits that go with early childhood concepts, kits to help teach catechism related topics like the Beatitudes or the Holy Famiy, kits that would go along with various periods in history or fields of science.  My goal is to assist homeschooling families in teaching their children, and oftentimes that includes giving younger siblings something to do that is engaging, educational and feels like “real school” without taxing the parent.

 

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Is it a family endeavor? Do you kids help?

I’m dragging them along whether they like it or not! Seriously, my 11 year old and 6 year old do many of the crafts and give me suggestions for improvement.  My 13 year old has proofread the instructions and make sure that they make sense.  She also goes to the store with me to figure out the benefit of using one material over another and occasionally she finds something that is so much better that we change the craft entirely.  My husband is my constant supporter, running errands and he’s already promised to be my master kit assembler should I get more orders than I can easily do myself.

What inspires you?

I truly feel that this endeavor is guided by the Holy Spirit.  God lead me out of the classroom, into homeschooling and now I’ve been given this awesome opportunity to bless other families using my talents.  I hope that I will be able to build this business to a level that supports my family financially and eventually, I am able to quit my in-home daycare and devote more of my time to my own children and their education.

The winner is Heather, who wrote: I love the Lent and March kits. It's still cold and spring is still far enough away . . . So why not craft when you are stuck indoors ;)

Questions and Answers about Restore

I've gotten a few questions about the Restore Workshop that you might be wondering yourself, so I thought I'd do a quick post to answer those questions.

I watched the video and think this sounds great! Do you know if there is a necessity to be available at certain times? Or is it at your own leisure?

The workshop will go live on March 16 and then new content will be added daily. All the content will remain on the site until a month after the last post goes up on April 26th. You can pace yourself all during that time. Also, you can download the content and save it until later.

Will Facebook be needed for the Restore workshop? I'd like to go off Facebook for Lent but I NEED this workshop.

Absolutely, positively NOT. No way.

#facebookfree 

No social media will be required for this workshop. 

Can you describe the content?

Each week is full to the brim with helps and tools. In Week 5, which falls during Holy Week, there will only be quiet time meditations each day.  There is a daily quiet time encouragement each day of the workshop, seven days a week. On Mondays I will share a pre-recorded podcast with women who have experience that overwhelmed, exhausted feeling and who have some helpful insight on restoration. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday bring in-depth essay on a specific dimension of restoration, exploring the tools we can use to bring us back to the life God intended we live. On Fridays, I'll offer a tutorial for creating something related to the topic of the week, something to lift your spirits and invite beauty into your lives. Most Friday creative pursuits have at least two options: one that takes a while and one that is fully do-able during a baby's short nap. Along the way, we hope you will be delighted by special gifts from our hearts to yours, like a place to journal and beautiful quote and verse printables to print out and hang. If you choose, you will also have a chance to engage in community in a private, encouraging, and restful place, learning from and sharing your journey with others. 

Will it require we go to the website each day or will it be delivered to our inbox daily? I'm trying to understand how this might fit into an internet lenten fast. 

It will be posted daily to the site. I think it would break an absolute fast, but I think it would work to just visit the site and download the PDFs and go about your day. I guess if you really wanted to stay away from the the web altogether, you could ask a big kid or your husband to download the PDFs for you. You wouldn't participate in conversation and you'd have the essence of the workshop on a paper copy. The essays and tutorials are all PDFs. The daily meditations are only available on the site throughout the workshop.

It's the workshop written from a Catholic perspective?

I'm Catholic, so I suspect everything about me is influenced by my tradition. That said, this workshop is written for women of all faiths and denominations. My contributors come from across the communities of faith, joined together in grace and sisterhood. In conversations within the community, we ask that love, grace, and charity guide our speech with one another, and find our grounding in faith within the guidance of the Nicene Creed. 

Are there any hardware or software requirements to be able to participate?

As long as you can access and see the website, there are no other requirements. 

Are the podcasts with Ann, Sarah, Aimee, Ginny, and Colleen at a specific time? Do we have to be available that day?

The podcasts are pre-recorded; the content is loaded at 8 am EST, so you’ll have access to each podcast in the morning on Mondays. It will then stay on the site for the duration of the workshop, so there is plenty of time to listen!

Are we reading essays written by you? Or are those 3 a week essay prompts for us?

I have written all the essays and all the Quiet Time prompts. The only writing left for you is your private journaling.

Ok, so you said we can print this right? I'm on the computer so little and Iphones don't work for me when I'm trying to *restore*. I need paper.

We have plenty for your paper! All the essays are lovely PDFs just waiting for a pretty binder. They had some awesome ones at Target for under $5, by the way.

This sounds wonderful. Is it directed to mothers? I, sadly, am not a mother, but a working wife and I would love to participate in something like this.

While I am writing to mothers from a mother’s perspective, the workshop content is surely helpful even if you are not a mom…there are a few places where I focus on how to balance children’s needs and serve them wisely, but I’m sure you can pull out what is applicable to you and your life. Most of the content is not focused specifically on motherhood, but on how to nurture ourselves in different areas. We’d love to have you join us!

How long will registration remain open? 

Registration will close just before Holy Week (April 12). The only thing you’ll miss if you join us late is the daily conversations with other participants and the slow progression of the daily quiet time meditations throughout the course, but the content will all be there for you to use and you’ll be able to read the previous conversations as well.

I would also like to gift a friend with this workshop- how can I do that ?

What a lucky friend! You would go through the purchase as normal- just mark in the notes in paypal that it is for a friend and their name and email address, and I’ll take care of the rest! I’ll send you a separate email with a note you can share with your friend to let her know. We've had a lot of fun bearing these gifts in the last week and we've found they're very much appreciated!

For more information and to watch the video invitation, click here. 

What Happens When You Let Them Take Over the House

I've mentioned previously what a big deal the Olympics always are around here. I've told you about the map work, the "student newspapers", the timelines, the totally awesome lesson plans. 

But I may have never mentioned a few things, things mostly of Christian's creation, though Michael and Patrick certainly were creative consultants. There were endless games of hockey in our finished basement, boys fashioning pucks and sticks of masking tape and cardboard. There was "ski jumping" off my bed when I was too snowed under by all-day-and-night morning sickness to protest. And there was a luge contest using pillows down the back stairs. (You thought I didn't know about that one, didn't you, boys?)

There was something else. Night after night of family dinners that more often than not were like an evening in a comedy club. One boy after the other trying to one-up the previous joke. Dad leading the way...

Poor Nicholas was bereft yesterday. "This Olympics is no fun. There is no one to play basement hockey. Can I please try to sled down the front staircase? It used to be way more fun..."

He should have gone to work with Michael.

Are you burned out, boxed in, and beat up?

I have something for you!

If you are feeling weary, frayed around the edges, or even falling apart at the seams, let's make something beautiful together. If you go to bed exhausted and wake up tired and it all seems like to much to do, let's journey together to a place of rest and peace. If you are willing to dig deep, do some soul-work, and seize the abundant joy that is Easter, let's begin the restoration.

Click here to take the first step.