Well, I missed the weekend, so here are links to some good reading for your Monday!
-From Anne Kennedy: "Girl, Go to Church."
-And, speaking of Anne, I love this too: "Trading Ash for Honey."
-And here is something very good, from Fred Sanders, about a sort-of oblique approach to iconography and the Trinity: "The Prepared Throne."
-This is about reading the authors that the authors you love loved to read: "Climbing Your Own Family Tree."
-Emily Hubbard, who I worked with on Not Alone, wrote this piece on Medium, and I think it's worth signal-boosting: "Use Accurate Language When You Talk About People Who Have Experienced Sexual Abuse or Assault Please."
-I love the college students at our parish, and so I loved this article: "Welcome to College. Join a Church."
-This is so cool: "Europe's Oldest Intact Book Is Discovered Inside the Coffin of a Saint."
-I enjoyed this article: "Fantasy vs. Reality through the Lens of To All the Boys I've Loved Before."
-Ouch: "Back to the Sources: A plagiarism incident involving Ann Voskamp shows the new dynamics of Christian publishing in a digital age."
From the Archives
-That time I met one of my literary heroines, Robin Jones Gunn.
-And the difference meeting her ended up making in my writing life.
(And for more links and quotations and such than I ever manage to post here on the blog, follow me on Twitter!)
That's it for this week! I hope you had a good weekend!
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
So, this is a book I gulped down. Jennifer Fulwiler’s writing voice is so good—if this was fiction, you’d call her a compelling protagonist, one you’re rooting for, and one who makes you want to know what’s going to happen next.
(On that note, may I just say, Wow, I miss Jen’s blog! I was a fan of it over a decade ago, and I’m sure she’s doing wonderful things on her radio show now, and she’s clearly still writing glorious books, but…I miss her blog. It just has to be said.)
So, what is One Beautiful Dream about? It’s about fulfilling a creative vocation while mothering a whole passel of kids. Which totally makes it what you'd call “relevant to my interests.”
In it, Jennifer tells the story of writing her first book, while not just mothering the kids she had, but gestating and giving birth to a few more. It’s about how she learned to stop treating her vocation as a mother as if it were an enemy of her vocation as a writer—as if in order to make room for her writing, her mothering vocation had to be the lion she held back with a whip and a chair.
I really love this bit, which I think sums up a lot of what the book’s about:
There is a tendency with anyone who loves any kind of work to fantasize that if you just had endless time for it, you’d be able to achieve perfection in this field. Yet what I’d discovered is that when you put love first, not only does your life improve, but your work improves…In my case, I faced interruption after interruption in my house full of babies. And, in the process, I finally learned how to write a book.
It is, like all good memoirs, a story that spends time on details that support the theme, and elides past those that don’t. For instance, from my experience as a NICU mom, I’m sure that a whole book could have been written about Jennifer’s experience of having a baby in the NICU, yet she only spends a short span of pages there.
And that’s okay, because that’s not what this particular book is about…but little spaces like that make me realize how much I’d like, someday, to read about the bits that happened in the spaces.
If she ever feels like writing those books, that is. Jennifer’s an author I’d trust to decide when and where to tell which stories--no author should feel pressure to write the things she doesn't want to write.
But all I have to say is: at this point, I’m here to read whatever books she feels like writing. I definitely recommend this book.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
This post contains Amazon affiliate links; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. I will probably use it to buy more books. (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)
In my second post about writing a Rule of Life, I talked about discerning the need for a Rule, and in my third, I talked about keeping track of what I was already doing. At the end of that third post, I implied that my next post was going to be about the prayer retreat where I wrote the first draft of my Rule.
But I’m going to take a one-post diversion away from that sequence, because there’s something else I want to talk about first.
I want to talk about how having a Rule of Life has helped me with my anxiety. *
One of the best things having a Rule of Life has done for me is that it has let me make big decisions from a place of rest and peace—and that has helped me make good decisions on the smaller stuff, even when I’m in a place of worry and exhaustion.
By taking the time to pray through my schedule and my responsibilities, I was able to decide what my days and my weeks should look like. What was most important? What did I want to do, for sure, every day? What came after that? When was the right time of day for each activity? And, what was my plan for days that weren’t normal—days when things went wrong? What was I going to do when someone got sick or a friend or family member needed me?
I thought through all of that, and I prayed through all of that, on my retreat. I made those decisions in a place of peace.
And it has made all the difference on the days when I've felt crowded and anxious and in the dark.
What was the key? Trusting the decisions I made in peace. On days when I'm anxious, I can tell myself, “I know you think the world is ending. I know you think this is a disaster. I know you think nothing can ever be right again. But we’re not listening to you right now”— (yes, I know, apparently when I talk to myself I either think I’m plural or I’m using the royal we) —“right now, we are going to do what we already decided we’re going to do. We’re not changing the plan because you feel awful. We’re just going to do the next right thing.”
And—this is the brilliant part—I knew what the next right thing was!!! I’d already prayed about it. I’d already held my thoughts and desires before the Lord, I’d meditated on His word, I’d prayed and listened and thought it all through.
I let my peaceful self make the decisions. And that kept my anxious self from having to bear that burden.
You know that old truism that you only have so much will-power during a given day? A Rule of Life means you only have one decision to make: Am I going to follow my Rule or not?
Life-changing, guys. It’s been life-changing.
Does that mean I never make tweaks or small adjustments? Of course not! I am still a mom, and not a monk. I can look at a given situation and say, “Yeah, the wise thing to do now is toss the plan and just sit and listen to this kid.”
But, honestly, even that kind of thing is something I thought about while making my Rule. My duty is first to God, and then to my husband and kids. Then other duties follow. So if my family is in need, that’s the kind of thing that takes priority. (You do have to have some kind of flexibility. I said that I’m a mom and not a monk—but even monks are monks and not robots.)
Still, even with the un-eveness of daily life, having a structure to my days has been life-changing, and it’s been especially life-changing on the days when I’m feeling anxious. I tend to make bad decisions when I’m anxious. I make decisions that make my world smaller and scarier and harder.
So, having a Rule that has already made a good deal of my daily decisions for me? Has kept my bad days from making my whole life bad. Because if I have a terrible day in which I still know what my duty is and I still do it, that means that when I start my next day—which might be a good one!—I don’t have any awful messes to clean up. I haven’t fallen horribly behind.
And instead of feeling angry at my yesterday’s-self, I feel grateful to her. She had a hard time, and she kept going anyway, because she wasn’t confused about what the right thing to do was.
A Rule is a guide-line. Even if you’re blind-folded, you can keep your hand on it and keep walking in the right direction. You might walk more slowly, but at least you won’t be walking in circles.
And when you’re able to take the blindfold off, you’ll know where you are.
I am so grateful for my Rule of Life.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
* Important note: Clinical anxiety is something that deserves clinical treatment. I have sought help from my doctor and from a psychologist in the past, when my anxiety actually was that acute, and I’m glad that I did. I’d encourage you to do the same, if yours is serious. I’m not talking about serious, diagnosable anxiety in this post. Having a Rule is a tool that you might use in that case—as I do myself!—but I would not look to a Rule as a cure or as sufficient if you’re in the middle of, say, panic attacks. Please seek professional help if you need it—it’s there for that reason, and it’s a great blessing—much along the lines of the availability of insulin for diabetics and eye surgery for cataracts!
(Also, it should go without saying, but: I am not a medical professional and nothing in here is medical advice.)
