Contentment

Inevitable and unavoidable

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment

We are in the midst of a large amount of “must-do” maintenance on the house.  We’ve got a plumber coming this afternoon, to work on an accumulation of minor problems that are beginning to add up to something major.  We’ve got the sprinkler repair man coming on Friday, to fix–again–the water pouring out of the main box each time we turn it on.  And we’re getting our gutters cleaned, before all the maple seeds begin sprouting in our eaves.

In the midst of all these plans, I heard a huge crash and clamor in our garage this morning.  I assumed the bike I’d hung up a few days before was no longer hanging; but no, it was the spring on our garage door.  One more call to one more person, for one more fix.

These are times where living more simply looks really appealing.  If we had a one story house, we could clean our own gutters.  If we didn’t have a garage, we wouldn’t have any doors to break.  If we didn’t have a sprinkler system, we wouldn’t need to prep it for winter and repair it constantly; though I admit I’m truly torn about the sprinklers.  I remember lugging hoses around our previous yard, in the heat of summer, while I was seven and eight months pregnant.  I thought this sprinkler system was a huge blessing for a long time.  I guess in this instance, living more simply would mean doing away with a yard completely.

It occurred to me recently, though, as I swept up dog hair for the umpteenth time:  no matter how much you strip down to the bare minimum, you’re still going to have stuff.  Assuming you’re not planning on joining the ranks of the homeless, you will always have a floor to sweep/vacuum/mop.  Even if you give away the majority of your excess clothing, you will always have laundry to keep up with.  You can do away with the large-scale upkeep by living in a maintenance-provided community, but you are still going to have a space to dust and clean and keep tidy.  (Well….I guess the clean part is optional.)

Stuff–at least some stuff–is completely unavoidable.  So I guess my plan is to do my best to ensure that my extraneous “stuff” remains minimal, to care for what I do have as well as I can (hence the incessant flow of repairmen over the next few days), and to enjoy what we do have as much as I can; to appreciate them as the blessings they are.  We were garageless for so very long that our garage, even with a broken door, is a huge blessing to me.  I love not scraping my windshield every winter morning.  I love having a place to store bikes, big wheels, and our blue bin.  I love not having to think about hailstorms damaging our cars.  So yes, broken door or broken sprinklers….I’m going to try to enjoy the stuff that I do have.  Because stuff is inevitable.

Priorities

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment
          Sometimes, I think we’re really confused.  Sometimes, I want to grab people and shake them and yell at them about what’s truly important, and what just doesn’t matter at all.  Sometimes, I think people have their priorities completely backwards and upside down.  And then, sometimes, I see something like this:
My girl recently lost two teeth, and went to kindergarten roundup, my boy is just about potty-trained, and my baby is almost sleeping through the night.  Time is going by too too too fast. In light of these recent events, I have decided that I want to spend more time enjoying my beautiful babies and less time doing things that don’t matter, like playing on Facebook, returning emails, and obsessing… over keeping the house picked up.  I don’t want to look back on these precious, fleeting years with regret.  I’ll still update y’all periodically, but I’m not going to spend so much time reading about you all. Forgive me for not keeping up with your business.  And, if you happen to come to our house, you may have to step over a pile or two of laundry, you may trip on some Thomas trains, and our beds may not be made.  You have been warned.  🙂
…and I’m struck by the idea that there are people who “get it.”  They may be few and far between, but there are people who understand where their priorities need to be.
          I’m convinced that there’s a generation (or more) of us that are going to suddenly look up and realize that they spent their entire life online; that, once tallied, their “downtime” playing Angry Birds or checking Facebook actually ate months of their total life.  That we are someday going to be old and gray and dying, and realize, as we look back, that we forgot to actually do any living.
          My husband recently withdrew from an MBA program; with his work schedule, it was a second evening each week away from home and family, and it was very unclear if the degree would really help him in any way, job-wise.  (He jokes that he did a “cost-benefit analysis.”)  The first Tuesday he didn’t go to class, he was playing football outside with the kids.  The second Tuesday, he attended the art fair at their school, and we all went out to dinner together.  There’s no doubt that you could create a persuasive argument that his decision “hurt” our future; that he might stall out in his job, that he could make “so much more” if he’d stayed with the program.  But our children are children only once.  We get no do-overs.  And I’m unbelievably blessed to be married to someone who chooses family.
          I’m dealing with choices as well; as my mornings fill up, my kid-free writing time has nearly disappeared.  My goal of a post a day, Monday through Friday, was pretty much shot with the arrival of spring break.  Am I going to sit parked in front of a computer when my kids are around?  Or am I going to actually be a mom, and do my best to enjoy my kiddos while they’re here?  I’m voting kids.  Because I don’t want to look up one day and realize that they’re grown and gone, that I’m nearing the end, and that I spent my life sitting in front of a computer, even if I was doing something worthwhile and productive.
          What are your priorities?  If someone on the outside watched how you spend your time, would your priorities be clear?  If you logged each and every minute of how you spent your day, what would that look like; what would it show?  Would it prove you value what you say is important to you?  How are we spending this life we’ve been blessed with?  Because I think we forget that someday it’s gone.

Moving Up

/ jenfletcher / 5 Comments

I struck up a conversation with a mom in the park one day.  She was one of those really easy-to-talk-to people; one of those people where one question—“So, you just moved?”—unleashes the entire backstory of the entire event, and all you need to do is nod and smile.

The (condensed) story went something like this:

“Yes, we weren’t even looking to move, but then we found out about this foreclosure, this woman was telling me all about how her house was going to be foreclosed on and we started really talking and I talked to my husband and we went to take a look at it, and it’s SO much bigger than our other house, with all this space, and the kids wouldn’t even have to change schools [it was in a neighboring subdivision], so we totally jumped on it.  It’s got FIVE bedrooms and three-and-a-half baths; it’s SO much bigger than the other house we were in….”

At this point, I admit, I laughed.  “I wouldn’t want to clean three-and-a-half baths,” I joked.  “I can barely stay on top of the two-and-a-half we have.  Or have to clean five bedrooms.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem,” she assured me.  “We just keep the doors closed and don’t ever go in those rooms.”  And the story continued….

But I got kind of stuck there.

I’m not even going to comment on that statement.  I’m just going to let it stand, by itself, in all its ridiculous glory.  (Okay, I guess that was a comment.)

The rest of the “conversation,” all I could think was, what’s the point??  Why on earth subject yourself to the hassle of a move, to the sorting and packing and cleaning and unpacking and having to sell your house (in a terrible market, I might add), to get a bigger home that you weren’t even going to use??  I realize that as a Christian, my perspective is vastly different from some people’s; but this is one situation where even just logically, it doesn’t seem to make sense.  Am I the only one to see the unbelievable futility in this?

Unintended consequences

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about the unintended consequences of the choices we make ever since I wrote the post about the banker and his $350K pay.  At that point, I focused on the biggest choice we make:  our attitude about our money; whether we treat it as a gift from God, or something we did ourselves.

Since then, though, I’ve been thinking more about the domino effect of our choices:  how one choice automatically leads to another, and another, and so on.    To use the banker as an example:  by deciding to become an investment banker on Wall Street, he (by default) chose an incredibly high cost of living.  While he could move to a cheaper area, (though probably not in this housing market), a move would result in a much, much longer commute.  His choice of occupation dictates much of the trouble he’s dealing with now.

We went through our own version of this a few years ago.  When my husband and I originally moved back to this area, we took his place of work and drew a “twenty-minute” radius around it.  Twenty minutes seemed like a reasonable commute, and we only looked for houses within that area.  Job change after job change would alter the commute, but never terribly far from that twenty minutes we started with.

Until his last job.  The twenty-minute commute turned into a forty-five minute commute (on a good day).  Sometimes, if traffic was exceptionally bad, we were looking at over an hour.  During overtime season (which would coincide with winter) he would be setting his alarm for 4:00 in the morning, to get to work early for OT, driving on snowy, icy highways.  It was getting really, really ugly.  So we decided to go back to our twenty-minute idea, and move; especially before the kids started school.

Keep in mind this was supposed to be a lateral move–we were not looking to “move up,” not going bigger and better, just closer to work (though I was shooting for a four-bedroom instead of a three).  But the definition of “closer to work” meant, we discovered, a more expensive house.  Not bigger or better or fancier (actually, most rooms are smaller); but still a bit more expensive.

Even now I think about “if we’d just moved a little farther west…..”  A few miles further and we would have paid a little less for housing–but it would have completely defeated the purpose of moving.  The goal was to save time (and get my husband his life back); a forty-five minute commute from the west instead of the east wouldn’t have gained us a thing.

(One other observation:  what we pay for in mortgage payments is MORE than made up for in what we save on gas.  So actually, we’re still coming out ahead.)

Think about choices and consequences, though, the next time you get tied up in knots about a problem.  What choices were made that lead up to this?  Is it something that can be changed?  I know that the housing market is a disaster right now, so harping about poor choices in housing is pointless.  But try to think back–really think back–to where the dominoes started to fall.  Is there a choice I can change to help simplify my life?  To help in my finances?  Is there something I thought was a “need” that’s actually a “want?”  Follow that trail of dominoes back to the beginning.  That is where the most effective change will be made.

A Grateful Heart

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment

Our bedtime routines have always included reading.  Even if it’s something short and sweet on a late night, I try to fit in at least a bit of cuddle-with-a-book time.  We used to snuggle in the cushy chair-and-a-half in the corner of the master bedroom; now the kids are bigger and we spread out on the sofa downstairs.  One night my son had discovered a new book on the bookshelf; one I had slid in quietly, intending to see how long it took to be discovered.

It was an enormous book of fairy tales, with incredibly detailed illustrations on each page.  I’d been talking to my mom about how I wanted just a book of “regular fairy tales;” no Disney, no marketing ploys, just the basic stories, and she had found this and bought it for the kids.  And what did my son choose to read that first night of discovering the book?  Hansel and Gretel.

I hesitated.  Hansel and Gretel isn’t exactly a bedtime story.  Let me read to you about a terrible stepmother who’ll lead kids into the woods to die and a wicked witch who eats children….and now let me tuck you in! might not be the best way to end a day.  But I did it.  (I then ended the night with my daughter’s choice, a short board book of nursery rhymes, hoping to soften the blow a bit.)

Then things got interesting.  As I tucked my daughter in that night I asked her, as always, what she was thankful for.  “Mommy and Daddy and my whole life today” (her standard answer) “and food.”  She continued quickly, before I could say anything:  “Not food like dinner.  Food like, we have food.  Hansel and Gretel didn’t have food.”

I sat there for a moment.  My brain was going a million miles a minute:  all the things in that story, the evil stepmother, the candy house, the wicked witch, cooking children, eating children, conquering the witch and making it home safely, and she walks away with….they had no food.  They were poor and hungry; indeed, they were literally starving.  And she was grateful that she had a house full of food.

I made sure that I included in our prayers that night thanks for a kitchen full of food; thanks that God had blessed us with an abundance and that any time we were hungry all we had to do was open the pantry or the fridge and dozens of choices beckoned.  For the rest of the night I looked at things through different eyes:  we have a sturdy house, to keep us warm and dry from the wind and rain.  We have a furnace that works, and (thank goodness) air conditioning when we need it.  We have running water and indoor plumbing and even a yard to play in.  My kids have their own bedrooms. We are so overwhelmingly blessed in our standard, day-to-day life and we so often take it for granted.  I was reminded of the verses in Psalms:  “Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure.  The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.  I will praise the Lord…” (Psalms 16:5-7).  I breathed prayers of thanks and praise not only for all these material things that give me such comfort on a regular basis, but also prayers of thanks for a little girl that reminded me of it.  And I prayed that God would continue to work in her heart in that way:  to make her extraordinarily thankful for even the most basic things and recognize them as the blessings they are.

A Different Kind of Clutter

/ jenfletcher / 1 Comment

I was sitting on the sofa at the end of the day when my husband asked me if I was feeling all right.  “No,” I admitted, “I’m not.  And I have no idea what’s wrong.”  We’d had lots of sickness in the house at that point, and I just attributed it to “maybe I’m starting to come down with something.”  I let it go.

As I lay in bed later, though, it finally hit me.  I’d had no time alone in….let’s see….I began to count back.  I hadn’t been alone in the house for almost three full weeks.  I’d had something to do, places to go, or the kids had had days off school for three weeks.  As a full-fledged introvert, it’s no wonder I was feeling so “off.”  Once I’d made that realization, I immediately started feeling better; just knowing what was the matter helped me improve, and I could start thinking forward to when I could make “alone time” a possibility in my future.  (Even knowing it was almost a week away gave me something to hope toward.)

I realize there are millions of Type A people out there, who thrive on “lots to do” and “busy-busy-busy!!”  I am not one of them.  So when I got to that point of being overwhelmed, I didn’t even recognize it for what it was.  I had too much “stuff” in my life:  not material, tangible possessions, but “stuff” on the calendar, which had filled up so gradually I hadn’t really noticed it.  I’d joked with other moms about how each “kid-free” morning had filled up with something to do; how quickly it went from “Gosh, both the kids are in school!  Freedom!” to “Gotta run!  Too much to do today!”

When things get too bad, too busy, I try to remember a quote referenced in Celebration of Discipline:  “I find He never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.”  (pg. 128; from Thomas Kelly.)  I need to remember:

“He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.”  (Psalm 23:2-3)

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.”  (John 14:27)

“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you.”  (Isaiah 26:3)

“Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”  (Psalm 34:14)

I challenge you to evaluate your calendars.  Do you see “peace” or an “intolerable scramble?”  I pray “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  (Philemon 1:3)

From Yahoo: “Banker’s $350K Pay Not Enough”

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment

Sometimes blog topics just fall in your lap.

This headline made me roll my eyes–but isn’t that what it was supposed to do?  The article (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bonus-withdrawal-puts-bankers-malaise-050100338.html) was an interesting read.  Some quotes:

“[Andrew] Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.”

 

“Facing a slump in revenue from investment banking and trading, Wall Street firms have trimmed 2011 discretionary pay. At Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Barclays Capital, the cuts were at least 25 percent. Morgan Stanley (MS) capped cash bonuses at $125,000, and Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) increased the percentage of deferred pay.

‘It’s a disaster,’ said Ilana Weinstein, chief executive officer of New York-based search firm IDW Group LLC. ‘The entire construct of compensation has changed.’ ”

 

“M. Todd Henderson, a University of Chicago law professor who’s teaching a seminar on executive compensation, said the suffering is relative and real. He wrote two years ago that his family was ‘just getting by’ on more than $250,000 a year, setting off what he called a firestorm of criticism.

‘Yes, terminal diseases are worse than getting the flu,’ he said. ‘But you suffer when you get the flu.’ ”

 

” ‘I wouldn’t want to whine,’ Schiff said. ‘All I want is the stuff that I always thought, growing up, that successful parents had.’ ”

 

(My personal favorite is the “it’s a disaster” quote.  But that’s beside the point.)

What I want to think about for a moment is how each one of us, from billionaires to people making nearly nothing, are faced with choices every day.  (Alan Dlugash, an accountant quoted in the article, states, “If you’re making $50,000 and your salary gets down to $40,000 and you have to cut, it’s very severe to you… But it’s no less severe to these other people with these big numbers.”)  We each have to decide how we’re spending our money and our time, and all of us can sometimes be forced to make decisions and slash certain items, regardless of our total income.  Where do we choose to live?  Do we choose private school or public?  Do we choose cable TV or no?  Do we choose a restaurant meal or eating in?

This is our biggest and most important choice, though:  Are we recognizing our income and our ability to earn it as a gift from God, or are we looking at it as something that we worked hard for and earned on our own?  (America loves the idea of the “self-made man.”)  How we view the source of our finances should make a big difference in what we do with them.

Richard Foster defines “Inner Simplicity” in Celebration of Discipline:

First: receive what we have as a gift from God.

Second:  know that it is God’s business (not ours) to care for what we have.  We can trust Him.

Third:  have our goods available to others—“if our goods are not available to the community when it is clearly right and good, then they are stolen goods.”

“If we truly believe that God is who Jesus says he is, then we do not need to be afraid…the almighty Creator and our loving Father…we can share because we know that he will care for us.”

Are the financial choices I make as a believer reflective of God’s work in my life?  Am I allowing him to lead my use of our resources, putting Him first, and trusting him to faithfully provide?  Hopefully I will let God guide my choices, as I start with the choice to be thankful to Him for the gifts He has given my family.

One parting thought:  “There are two ways to get enough:  one is to continue to accumulate more and more.  The other is to desire less.” (–G.K. Chesterton)

The 100-Item Challenge

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment

I remember reading a few months back about a “100-item challenge,” where minimalists were encouraging each other to pare down to only one hundred possessions.  Upon first reading, I burst out laughing—I have a hundred items in my two china cabinets!  (Turns out I only have fifty-six, but you get the idea.)  The more I read, the more I had to laugh.  Except for a few people who truly took this idea very seriously, it seemed that there were addendums and caveats around everything.  I understood how two shoes could equal one pair, but things started to get fuzzier when a set of plates—either four or eight—could be counted as “one” item.  My favorite exception was to not count the things the family shared.  Um…..that’s pretty much my entire house.

I appreciate the idea, though; the thought that the less we have, the more freedom we have.  And I was reminded of the challenge when I was reading the “Simplicity” chapter of The Pursuit of Discipline, by Richard Foster.   “De-accumulate!  Masses of things that are not needed complicate life.  They must be sorted and stored and dusted and re-sorted and re-stored ad nauseum.  Most of us could get rid of half our possessions without any serious sacrifice.”  (p. 92)

That, to me, is a challenge.  That is a concrete, specific, doable idea, with very little “fuzziness.”  That means half our books…. half our CD’s….half our shirts, pants, sweaters, etc…half the stuff in the china cabinets…..[Sentimentality enters, stage left:  “But, but, but!!!!”]  There are a concrete number of things we own, which can then be divided by two.  Is it possible?  Could I actually get rid of half of all these things “without any serious sacrifice”?

Richard Foster reminds us, in that same chapter, that “if our goods are not available to the community when it is clearly right and good, then they are stolen goods.”  Keep that idea in the back of your mind the next time you open a cabinet or closet.  I will be.

Ronald McWho?

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment

I had one of my proudest parenting moments ever last week.

I was driving the kids to school in the morning, and they were discussing possible substitute teachers for my daughter’s class.  My son mentioned that it might be our neighbor across the street, Mrs. McDonald.  He then immediately got the giggles.  “Whose husband’s name is Ronald,” he laughed.  (It actually is…. we’ve mistakenly gotten their mail before.)

My daughter didn’t get it.

“You know!”  My son continued.  “Ronald McDonald!”

My daughter remained oblivious.

“You know!  Ronald McDonald!  From McDonalds!”  One last valiant effort to make his sister “get it.”

She still, really, didn’t get it.  My six-year-old daughter had no idea who Ronald McDonald was.

Words cannot express how unbelievably excited I was at that moment.  All my attempts to keep my kids from advertising, which seem to be rapidly crumbling the older they get, have, apparently, made a difference.

Now, I do think that if you gave my daughter a picture of Ronald McDonald, she would likely know who he was affiliated with.  And she definitely recognizes the “Golden Arches.”  But the fact that she didn’t know his name is a fact I will hold near and dear to my heart for a long time.

I think we’re starting to think we’re immune to the lure of the ad, since they’re everywhere.  We think we’re “above” that, and not affected by them anymore.  It comes down to this, though:  usually, if you don’t know something exists, you don’t want it.

I’m sure an argument could be made for “I could really use a [insert made-up useful item here],” but for the most part, no one wants something until that little seed of desire is planted in the back of their mind.  And then it grows.  I like that…I could use that….I want that….I need that.

I don’t know how much longer I can shield my kids from that creeping desire for “more” that ads give, but I’m not giving up without a fight.

 

Thoughts on Thoughts

/ jenfletcher / Leave a comment

Philippians 4:8:  “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” 

The Bible Reader’s Companion defines the words this way:  “the true, which is the reliable and honest; the noble, or worthy of respect; the right, which conforms to God’s standards and merits approval; the pure, which is moral and chaste; the lovely, which is pleasing and agreeable; the admirable, which is worthy of praise.”  (p. 809)

Look around at your surroundings for one minute.  Do they contribute to your ability to think such positive thoughts?  Are the rooms around you worthy of respect?  Do they merit approval?  Are they pleasing, agreeable, and worthy of praise?  It’s hard to think true, noble, and admirable thoughts when you are continually surrounded by “I need to” and “I should have,”  “I hate this” and “what a mess.”

One of the best benefits of getting rid of overwhelming clutter is the freedom in your mind:  the weight, the burden that is lifted off of you, where you are suddenly able to focus on better things.  Instead of drowning and being dragged down, you’re light, free and clear.  The negative thoughts are gone, and you’re able to think on the right, lovely, and admirable.

Can you imagine what this world would be like if everyone could live by this verse?