Happy New Year Friends! I’ve been chewing on some New Year thoughts, and wanted to share a brief series called RESOLVE, reflecting on some of the ways we can grow in a happier, healthy, God-honoring life. Just some food for thought as we intentionally determine the course of our days this year. Hope it’s helpful! Thanks so much for reading.
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Sometimes my friends and I reflect on how different it is now that Google and smart phones and Pinterest are at our fingertips at all times. Back in the day, you learned from a person. If you were a young wife and wanted to bake a pie, you asked your mom, or aunt, or grandma. She probably slipped you a butter-stained well-worn recipe card, then showed you how to roll the dough and pinch the edges just so. At least, that’s how my grandma taught me to bake.
Nowadays, if you want to bake a pie, you thumb “Best pie ever” into Pinterest or Google and approximately 3 million recipes, all with professional pics, come flooding before your eyes. You probably choose one from an expert: Pioneer Woman, Martha Stewart, or Ina Garten perhaps. At least I do.
Then, when we want to get in better shape, we turn to Jillian Michaels, and when we want to lose a few pounds we fork out a fortune for the top-notch nutrition system, and when we want to get our finances under control we sign up for Financial Peace University. All of these are great, and there are most certainly some awesome experts out there and I commend any efforts to learn and grow in these areas.
But sometimes the onslaught of all these experts can leave us feeling a little overwhelmed. I remember reading a book on marketing and the author insisted that in order to make it big and sell lots of whatever you’re selling, you have to bake in the Wow. That is, it has to be beyond the best. It has to absolutely WOW everyone.
Ok, fine. But as I read that, I mentally sifted through all the different arenas where I am called upon for leadership or love. I thought about being a wife, I thought about my home, my meal-planning and cooking, cleaning and organizing, I thought about raising and discipling my children, about homeschooling them, I thought about being a discipler of women, of being a pastor’s wife, a blogger, a conference speaker, a children’s ministry teacher, an author, a friend, a daughter of a disabled mom, of being a housemate and neighbor. And then I’m also so crazy as to think it’s not too much to ask that I even sneak in a hot shower 2-3 times a week!
I wrote in the margin of the book: I cannot bake in the Wow to every area of life.
And that’s just it. The challenge with being surrounded by experts is that these people bake in the Wow to their own area. Great! But then we turn to all of them, and assume we need to bake in their wow in that area as well, and with a quick click we can turn to so many experts at once and begin thinking we need to bake Martha Stewart cakes while rocking Jillian Michaels bodies living in Pinterest-worthy homes. Back in the day, we would have turned to maybe 1-3 people to help us grow in some area. Now, we have hundreds right in the palm of our hand.
Last week, I had the joy of getting together with a friend and teaching her to sew a skirt. It was a simple thing, and I’m sure she could have figured it out on her own, or YouTubed a tutorial. But we had such a fun morning, cutting and stitching, singing along to worship music. Heidi joined us, and we all we were able to have rich conversation in the midst of learning a new skill. And I realized that morning, the thing we miss when we only tap into experts, is learning through relationship.
This is why downloading a podcast or even reading a book will never be the same as sitting together with people who know you and studying, learning, growing, discussing together. They are the ones who can read your body language, see a tear in your eye, ask you a hard question, speak a Spirit-led word of encouragement. They are the ones who know your mom is sick, or your husband lost his job, or you’re trying to get pregnant. They are the ones who will you see you fail — and succeed — and weep and rejoice with you all along the way.
There is just no substitute for learning and growing in community. Real community. No celebrity or expert can come close the value of learning from each other. From living in community and asking questions, asking for help, making known our weaknesses and struggles, and also offering our gifts and talents and wisdom as well.
So, though it might not top most people’s lists, I RESOLVE this year, to learn and grow in relationship.
{Thanks for reading.}