Change, Change and More Change

I've been changing and rearranging here on Paige's Pages.

Actually, changing and rearranging seems to be a theme in my life right now. Last week, I painted and redecorated Meg and Julia's room ... we made new curtains and a throw pillow for each girl's bed, painted the dresser and put new handles on the drawers, painted the metal bunk bed, painted the walls bright and happy colors. The room looks completely different now.

Today, I rearranged the living room in our home. We had taken down the Christmas tree and suddenly I wanted to do something different with the space. It wasn't major changes, but just enough to make the room feel fresh and new.

I suppose my recent fondness for changing spilled over onto changing up the blog. Truly, it needed to be revamped. I found a new template. I love the new blue look of my blog. Next, I learned how to add pages, and created this bar at the top of the blog. In all of my reading so that I could figure out how to change things up, I discovered some fun gadgets to add to my sidebar. My favorite of all the changes is a new button at the very bottom of my blog that looks like this:



The button was a "freebie" from a woman named Melanie with a beautiful heart for God. Her word of the year is "giving" and so she was giving of her talents in graphics and web design by making a word of the year button to anyone who asked. I'm glad she did ... it gives me another way to share what God is doing in my heart as I focus on the laundry in 2012. For more about Melanie, check out her blog: Only a Breath.

I guess that my new blog changes are really no different that rearranging the living room, or painting the bedroom a new color and buying new bedding to match. It's like a breath of fresh air. Suddenly I've got a new enthusiasm for blogging again. Certainly, change can be a very good thing. And thankfully, changing up a blog is not nearly as expensive as redecorating a room!

As I've thought about change, a couple of scriptures came to my mind. I love what James 1:17 has to say about God and change: Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. And then there is this scripture from Numbers 23: 19: God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?

Today, on this 4th day of a brand-new year, I'm glad for the ability to make personal changes ... big ones, small ones, significant ones or even small blog changes that really don't amount to a hill of beans. But I'm ever so grateful that I serve a God who never changes!

Tales from the Laundry Room

New Year’s resolutions depress me. It’s goal-setting at its worst ... or at least that’s the way it always seems to work out for me. Never fails that two weeks into the new year and I’m already struggling with my resolutions. Then I start feeling like a failure and beating myself up for my inability to become a better person.

I’m not against goal setting. In fact, I think it is a necessary part of life ... at least it is necessary for those who want to continue to grow and change. Goal setting itself isn’t bad. It’s just somehow combining a new year with a list of resolutions dooms me to failure.

So for the past several years, I’ve done something different. I’ve forgone the resolutions for the new year in favor of a word of the year. It works like this ... I begin to pray and ask God what he would like for me to focus on in the coming year. Over the next few days (or even weeks) a word will be impressed upon my heart. This is my word of the year and whenever I look back I can always see how I grew or changed or learned lessons relating to that word. I never know exactly how it will all come together because I am not setting the goal for myself. Rather I am yielding myself to what God wants to show me and teach me in a particular area of my life.

When I started thinking about my word for 2012, I knew that there were so very many qualities I needed to work on adding in my life: consistency, serving, training, finding joy, etc. And when I asked God which word I should focus on for the next year (in a half-hearted sort of way because for some reason I really didn't expect an answer right then and there), He immediately responded with LAUNDRY.

I am ashamed to admit this but chances are pretty good that I probably rolled my eyes at the Good Lord's suggestion. You see, I hate to do laundry. It is my personal nemesis. I dislike washing the clothes, drying the clothes, folding the clothes, putting the clothes away ... I even dislike buying laundry detergent because it is so expensive.

Over the years, I have come to realize that I dislike laundry because there is no end to this chore. If I clean the bathroom, it will remain clean for a few hours at the very least. If I mop the floor, generally it looks mopped for the next day or so. Even washing dishes is a chore that can be finished. My counters will stay mostly cleared between meals. These are jobs that I can complete.

Not so with laundry ... Just as soon as you think you have emptied the basket at long last, then it is time for bed and the basket is full again. And with 5 kids in our home, trust me ... the basket is always full, and there is always another load that needs to be washed, dried, folded and put away.

So when God immediately told me that I was going to be focusing on laundry in the coming year, my response was something like this:

"Really, God? My word for 2012 has to be LAUNDRY? Surely you must be kidding me!"

He wasn’t ... for then, in that soft and gentle way of the Holy Spirit, I began to see more than just a basket full of dirty underwear and smelly socks. In focusing on the laundry I discovered so much more:

*staying consistent in taking care of this dreaded chore
*training my children to help me share this daily burden
*joyfully serving my family by caring for them even in the most mundane of ways
*finding pleasure even in something I don't care to do
*accepting help from my husband without being critical of the way he does the laundry or feeling guilty that he is choosing to help me empty the basket

God knows I need all those qualities above. He (and I) also know that if I had a long list of New Year’s resolutions relating to all of these traits I'd either begin to feel overwhelmed, dooming myself to fail before I’d ever gotten started. And in the same way, if I made consistency, training, joyfully serving, accepting help, etc as my words for the year, I'd likely forget which words I was focusing on and not make any headway at all in my personal growth. God knows that I won't forget the word LAUNDRY. In fact, laundry is something I must do each and every day. And now that God has gotten my attention regarding laundry duty in 2012, chance are that I will not forget what God has promised to teach me through something as mundane and despised as laundry duty.

Now that I understand what I can learn and the possibilities of what God can show me, I'm a bit more eager to go wash a load of clothes. Hopefully my enthusiasm doesn't wane before Valentine’s Day!