on becoming a streaker.

I am a January girl.  I love new calendars and goals for the year.  I love the freshness of a new year, seeing new joggers on the street and dreaming of what’s next.

I read through a quick and convicting little book today about setting mini-habits.  The premise is that we set too lofty of goals that rely on motivation (which will fail at some point), and that people would be better off with tiny, mini-goals in order to trick our brains into compliance.  It is for that reason that I am sitting down tonight to type out 5o words on my fancypants new macbook.  It is also why I ridiculously ran around our shop 5 times.  Don’t be impressed.  It’s not that big of a shop.  The idea is if your mini-habit is laughably small, you’re on track.  So here are my mini-goals for 2015:

* Run around the shop one time every single day.  Yep, that one is laughably easy and once I hit my goal, I ran 4 additional laps.  Like a rockstar.  Except it would take me 20 times around the shop to make a mile and I don’t even want to think about how many laps to hit a half marathon.  Still, hitting that  teeny tiny goal felt good and I think the author might be on to something.  He referred frequently to his own experience of dramatically changing his fitness level by challenging himself to complete one push up per day.

* Read one sentence of the Bible every morning.  Be thou impressed.  I’m sure it would take me eons to read the whole thing at that rate but my hope is that committing to putting my body in the chair will improve the amount of bible I’m reading lately.

 * Write fifty words per day.  So far I’m at 332.  Easy peasy.

What are your goals for the year?  Have you ever thought of doing mini-goals?  What laughably small thing could you commit to do now?

grace in a minivan.

She asked for music in the car.  Truth be told, I wanted silence.  But I slipped in her CD.
Kids' songs were the soundtrack to a day full of errands.  Veggie Tales gave way to worship songs and my big girl sang:

You make beautiful things, You make beautiful things out of dust. 

You make beautiful things, You make beautiful things out of us.

Our imperfect voices together and I was undone.  

My childhood was not like hers.  He makes beautiful things.

He also makes funny things.  This picture, for example:

that one time we accidentally took our three kids to buy 9 carts full of groceries.

So this week has been rough.  Really really rough.  Swearing under my breath, sitting in a puddle of tears rough.  There was sweetness:  Claire singing "Happy Birthday, Jesus" in our capitol building with the rest of her elementary school.  And hard moments:  showing up to get a grocery list at church and finding out that I was signed up to pick up (among other things) 298 boxes of generic macaroni and cheese.  And yet, we managed.  It was not very graceful.  But we fulfilled our obligations, finished up the final parties and projects, took gifts to our teachers and spent today, this first day of vacation in our jammies.  We might do the same tomorrow.

Last night, I served a meal to our church's Teen MOPS group with my dinner group girls.  Then we ate matching burgers and giggled at Venti's.  Sometimes, relief doesn't come.  You know you're going right back into the thick of it.  But bouda burgers and those girls are good for my soul.