Simplicity ...

My friend Linny at A Place Called Simplicity, has gotten me back into the blog world and encouraged me (unknowingly) through the desert in my life. She has started a new type of post today to share with others ways that God has helped us to simplify our lives. I love this idea and am excited to jump in! Early last year, I tried to develop a blog centered around this very idea. I love being able to share practical ways that the Lord has helped us through the years to simplify our lives. It is sometimes just a simple suggestion someone has made about how to keep up with laundry and other times it is about big life changes. Both have made impacts on our family life that I feel is beneficial to share with others.

Although I want to be very open about these areas of our lives with more than family and friends, I felt uncomfortable sharing honestly about our children. I developed the separate blog to try and give them pet names and more general photos. The truth is that I do not have time to keep two blogs and that is all part of simplifying :) I have decided instead to simply change the title of our blog. I am sure that makes sense to those of you who knew the title before. We still have personal blogs for both Cade and Claire. I will leave links to those blogs on this blog, but they are closed blogs. I no longer add to them but want the time we spent walking out adoptions to be an encouragement to others. So, if you do know us personally and want to share our blogs with others, feel free to do so but if you could please not share our family name or location with others, it would be much appreciated.

As for the title of our blog, it has everything to do with what I feel most of us walk out each day. There is so much media, peer pressure and "blah" around us that it sometimes is hard to know what is "real." I have been striving for years to keep a clear picture of what God has called myself personally and our family to. His Word is where reality and ultimately simplicity lies. It is where I have to send myself each time the thought of a beautiful new house with perfect bedrooms for each of my children enters my mind. It is there I must run when I begin to doubt my ability to walk out a trial that I have been placed in. It is the only place we can find true reality in a reality tv driven age.

So, in the weeks to come look for posts about simplifying our lives and check out Linny's blog to follow more links with even more amazing families doing the very same thing! For today I want to leave you with a story from many years ago ...

When I was a young mother of four children with my husband deployed for 1-6 months at a time, I struggled to get my laundry done. I would have piles of it that would not get washed and if it was washed, never folded. I hated this area of my life. I felt like a slave to the piles of clothing and I wanted a way out.

The Lord had placed me in a Bible study of very wise women and the leader became my most memorable mentor. When I broke down bawling about my laundry, she did not laugh at me. It sounds ridiculous to me now, (how simple ... just do the laundry) but it was consuming me. She looked at me with all seriousness and said, "Lisa the Lord has shown me four baskets, one in each of the children's rooms, one in yours and one in the bathroom. You will assign a day to each of those baskets and on that day do all the laundry for that room including the bedding. That way you can return the folded laundry in the same basket and not have to consume your time with sorting while folding."

You have NO idea how this idea set me free from bondage. Truth be told, I was suffering from a perfectionist mentality and was not keeping up with my laundry because I never had enough time to be able to do the laundry from start to finish "perfectly". The ability to concentrate on one room a day, including the bedding, gave me a chance to also deep clean that room for the week as well and feel successful. It worked and I was most grateful.

This is not how we do laundry today, so I am not saying it is the only way to keep up with laundry. I will say that it may be just the right idea for a season in someone else's life, just as it was for me. If this sounds like something that may save you from a mess you have yourself in right now, let me share one more piece of simplifying that I learned from that time. My children had far, FAR ... F-A-R ... too many clothes.

I have learned that I can fall victim to this issue of excessive clothing very easily and want to encourage you to think a bit about it. If I were to simply move the shirts that Cade uses in his closet from front to back as he wears them, I would likely not use some of the shirts in his closet. It is nice to have extras and he does but lots of children have closets full of clothes that they either do not wear. Others have so much clothing for their children that they find themselves stacking up the dirty laundry because there is more clean to still go through. It can make you a slave to your laundry.

In an effort to try and not to perfect a closet, I do keep a couple rules of thumb. No more casual jeans than what my kids can wear in a 5 day school week and if it has not been worn in a month of the season it belongs in ... it's gone. There are a few more great "keeping clothing in check" ideas that I will share with you on anther "simplicity" post :)