January as Baseline.

SETTING BASELINE (PRACTICE STARTS HERE).

All the memes about January were true. January felt like it was 200 days long, and at the start of February, I got rocked by the flu and was completely out of commission for a weekend. 

So this is how I’m starting February: feeling both behind on the month and a little shocked that we’re only into the second month of 2020. When I finally got around to debriefing this past month, this is what I noted:

I practiced centering prayer 11 times, wrote for 20 minute sessions or longer for 14 days, read with the boys for 20 minutes or longer for 15 days, did 17 workouts on the Peloton or outside, and had 23 morning quiet times. Honestly, my immediate response was to be bummed out by those numbers. The goal was to hit 31 for each of those five habits, and I fell short.

Then I thought, this is baseline.

Outside of Peloton, which tracks your streaks for you, I had never actually tracked any of these particular habits. This was baseline – the starting point from which you compare your progress – and the exciting thing about baseline is that usually, it’s all up from there.

I click with pretty much everything James Clear writes, but I especially resonated with his statement: “Consistency develops ability.” Or, said by Gretchen Rubin: “What we do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” 

I’m working on it.

The good news is that there are still eleven months left in this year, starting with February. January was baseline, and there’s still room for practice and progress.

We get to try again.

PERSPECTIVES (BOOKS, PODCASTS, POSTS)

Books – I read three books: Loveology; Dance, Stand, Run; and The Family Upstairs. 

Loveology by John Mark Comer is the best book on marriage I’ve read so far. He connects the purpose of marriage with work and calling in a compelling way, and both his presentation and coverage feels very millenial, in a good way.

Podcasts – My first favorite was the Fight Hustle, End Hurry ten-podcast series. John Mark Comer’s explanations of the spiritual disciplines made total sense to me. For the past weekends of the year, our family has been practicing Sabbath (and I’ve added a digital Sabbath), and now I’m so much more sensitive and aware of when I’m not giving people I love my full attention. 

The second podcast favorite was the She Reads Truth episode “Rivals & Restoration” about Jacob and Rachel and Leah. I think sometimes we glaze over the drama of the Old Testament as arcane or exceptional, and we forget that what makes us human hasn’t changed, and the character of God hasn’t changed either.

Posts – James Clear’s Habit Guide is the cliff notes version of Atomic Habits. Both have been hugely helpful for me, as I work on my goals for this year. For February, I’m working on “never missing twice.”

Speaking of never missing twice, the 29-Day Challenge pictured in this post can be downloaded from Austin Kleon’s post, here. 

(This blog post contains affiliate links, so if you do purchase Atomic Habits or another book mentioned, I’ll receive an itty bitty commission).

2020 Vision.

This is the year of 2020 vision.

Blowing out the candles on 32 / 2019.

Five months ago, when I was unpacking the boxes in our garage after we moved to our new home this year, I found a worksheet that I filled out in 2013.

The worksheet was called Your Ideal Day, and it listed out prompts like describe your morning routine and what does your environment look like?

You should know that when I filled it out, I was still living in Shanghai. I had a master’s degree but no job. We had no idea where we were going to live when we returned home. We had no savings and weren’t even close to buying a house. It was before I got pregnant for the first time.

I wrote the vision when I had no money, no job, no prospects, no home.

And yet – that piece of paper that I completely forgot I had – described almost exactly the life that I live now, down to our master bedroom balcony and the East-West positioning of our Spanish-style house so that we can watch the sunset as we cook dinner in the kitchen and eat a meal in the backyard. 

I don’t know why some dreams come true and others die, but I do believe there’s something about writing down the vision that propels us forward in faith. I don’t believe that we can strive or hustle our way to anywhere we want to go, but I do believe that we were made in the image of a Creator who used words to speak life, and we can use words to speak life over ourselves, too. I don’t believe that we can snap our fingers and get everything we ask for, but I think we can ask for fresh glimpses of God’s goodness and His hand in making a way where there is none.

As Ruth Chou Simons puts it: “We can’t go where we have no vision.”

For the last few months, I’ve been asking God for a new vision for 2020 and the decade ahead. My word for 2019 was light. And it’s light that led me to practice – the action that follows hearing (see: Matthew 7:24, James 1:22), the means of progress, the way of becoming. Practice – my word for 2020.

I see this year as a year of starting small and looking insignificant, which when you’re a 3 on the Enneagram is a hard pill to swallow. I have a feeling that this year, like the last, is going to be humbling and unglamourous. For all the flashiness of a new decade, I think obedience for us is going to look like living simply, slowing down our pace, saying no to the good so that we can say yes to the best, and fighting to practice habits and spiritual disciplines on a daily basis.

We started with Sabbath, but this ethos has rolled out into other parts of our lives, too – earlier bedtimes, fewer shopping trips, quieter mornings. I’m excited to see how we’ll experience God this year, and I’m excited to see how this lifestyle shift will prepare us for the years ahead.

If you have a word for 2020 or a vision for the new year, I’d love to read it in the comments below.

Start with Sabbath.

On January 1, per our annual family New Year’s tradition, we drove north to stay at a hotel by the beach for a night.

We’re on our fifth year of these mini family getaways. We used to stay at the Blue Lantern Inn, a cute bed & breakfast that looks out onto Baby Beach in Dana Point. One of the key selling points is that they  coffee to your room in the morning, but with three kids now, we’ve since outgrown it. Now we stay at a hotel in Huntington Beach that is both pet-friendly and kid-friendly. The room we book has a huge bathtub and a pull-out bed that all the kids, in theory, can sleep on, and the hotel offers a triple threat of treats –  wine hour, complimentary cold brew, and unlimited s’mores.

The intention in past years was to use this time to dream and pray over goals as a family, but that’s hard to do with three kids five and under. Now, Dave and I pre-game the dreaming and goal-planning with our own retreat sometime in the fall, and use the annual new year’s getaway to rest and play.

This year, after check-in, we went to happy hour on the pier. There were hundreds of people out, taking pictures and selfies, trying to capture the unreal sunset that night – all the shades of orange, purple, and blue – the first sunset of the new decade. We went back to the hotel for wine and s’mores and sitting around the firepit. The boys watched Home Alone on the pull-out bed. I brought a special bath bomb for their bath, and with the blessing of blackout curtains, my husband and boys slept in until past 9 a.m. I used the quiet time for something as life-giving for me as sleep: journaling, goal-setting, Bible-reading, and prayer. And when the baby woke up, the two of us headed downstairs to pick up hot chocolate so thick it was almost ganache, with homemade caramel and chocolate chip marshmallows, and nitro cold brew with cream. Breakfast was longanisa sausage and pancakes with butter-crisped edges topped with berries and vanilla butter and macadamia nuts. Then more beach time, us sprawled out on hotel towels, me with a book and the boys with sand toys, all blue skies and soft, sea breeze and grounding sand.

Now that we’re home, our boys say, out of the blue, “Remember the hotel? That was fun.” They say, “Remember the hot chocolate?” or “Remembering when we watched the movie and ate french fries?”

They remember. We remember. We remember what it feels like to celebrate and sleep in and savor all of our favorite foods. We remember how to be present and intentional and unrushed, how fun it is to be a family. We remember how to exercise contentment for where we are at this exact moment in this new year.

Our new year’s retreat was not officially Sabbath, but it captured the ethos of it: “a day to pamper your soul in God’s presence.” (John Mark Comer – Sabbath).

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I set 8 goals this year, and the first one is this: to practice Sabbath, every week for all 52 weeks of this year. 

For the last few weeks, we’ve been calibrating and experimenting with what it looks like for our family to set apart a day that is restful and worshipful, a day that shows gratitude for the week behind and celebration for the week ahead.

The questions that we keep coming back to are: What’s life-giving? What does self-care and soul-care look like in this season? What actually feels restorative? How do we model the rhythms of rest and work to our kids? How do we stay present? How do we follow the lifestyle of Jesus in 2020?

We’re learning new rhythms and building on family traditions. I don’t have all the answers to those questions, but we’re starting with Sabbath.

Counting the Fruit

Even in the valley, there are mountaintop moments.

At the beginning of this year, I started writing in fine-point Sharpie, on a notepad with “Remember” letterpressed in deep blue script, my “wins” from the past month.

I write down every good thing I can think of – who we had over for dinner, what essay was published, where we went as a family, funny things the boys said. These lists are part gratitude, part goal progress, part weapon.

In a time when I was still reeling from broken friendships and lost community; when we were still searching for a new house while renovating, with difficulty, our old one; when I was feeling defeated and discouraged – these lists became ammunition against the lies that I didn’t have enough, that I wasn’t doing enough, that God wasn’t a good God.

The practice of counting the fruit (see: John 15:1-8) – noticing, acknowledging, remembering, paying attention to God’s faithfulness, His provision, the ways that He shows up – saved me from so much further grief. What started as a practice to combat the heaviness of defeat became a rallying cry to keep going on the path of abundance. 

This practice helped me find a way back to joy – not in the distant future, but in the here and now.

Because there are mountain top moments, even in the valley.

The fruit doesn’t have to be shiny or perfect.

Every year, in the fall, we go to Oak Glen as a family. It’s one of my favorite family traditions and one of the first things I wrote down on October’s win list. 

We head to Los Rios Rancho, where we line up for BBQ brisket sandwiches and watch them smoke the meat. We buy caramel apples and apple cider in heavy glass jugs and pie with cinnamon crumb topping. If Coffee Bean’s Winter Dream Tea Latte is “Christmas in a cup,” Oak Glen is the epitome of autumn – leaves and hay everywhere, brisk weather, apple everything.

The boys wanted to pick apples this year, so we pushed our City Select between the lines of cars and over the dirt mounds to the other side of the street where the apple orchards were. I don’t know why, but I’m always wearing the wrong shoes when we go. Hay kept getting stuck in my black leather sandals, so I would stop to shake out my shoes. And every few steps, our two-year old would bend down to examine an apple on the ground and bring it to his mouth, even when we told him those round, hollow marks marring the fruit were holes that the worms had dug.

He couldn’t reach the pretty, shiny fruit without help, so he did the best with where he could reach.

It was a 10k and not a marathon? Still a win. An essay and not a published book? Still a win. You haven’t arrived? Me either. Jess Connolly puts it this way: “The win is in using your gifts. The obedience of using your gifts is the abundance.”

So what if the fruit is not shiny or perfect? You don’t have to throw it away. There is a child out there, probably one of mine, who will pick it up off the ground, notice the worm holes, and bite into it anyway.

We don’t have to wait.

I have nearly a year’s worth of fruit that I’ve counted – from first steps, to finished blog posts, to moments of connection in date nights. I can look back and see my personal storehouse of encouragement. 

Did I execute my work perfectly? No. Did I push through discomfort? Did I get up early on days when I wanted to sleep in? Did I hit publish on things that I was afraid to put out into the world? Did I push through the fear to share part of my heart that connected with one other person? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Progress over perfect.

Every day, write down your moments of gratitude. And every week, count your fruit. You’ll be surprised what you come up with at the end of every month. God’s faithfulness is interwoven into everything. One day you will look back and see how much you’ve grown. Maybe one day you’ll look back and see that you have an abundance of fruit in overfilled buckets.

We don’t have to wait until the right season to count the fruit. Unlike picking apples, we can do this all year round.

In this spirit of Thanksgiving, let’s practice noticing, naming, and counting the fruit.