Skip to main content

The Slow Road


A few months ago, I made a massive, terrifying, trajectory-changing decision about my life. Bolstered by the confidence of family and friends and buoyed by the promise from God that He would provide...

I quit my job, just before leaving for Kenya.

I quit it, and after I returned I made the dive into full-on freelance worker-ness. If worker-ness is even a word.

I'm starting nearly from scratch, and duh-ude, is it hard to start there. Slow. Completely uncertain. Faith building, yeah, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't want to look at my bank account balance right now. Or that every proposal rejection doesn't sting. That it's depressing to check my email to see that nothing has come in yet, but I do it anyway.

It's slow.

I want to be busier. I'm used to having little free time in my schedule and many more things to do than I can fit in. My feet want to go, go, go. My hands want to do, do, do. My brain wants to keep planning, plotting, scheming. It's more than I can keep up with emotionally.

Slow it down.

I'm working towards that. More time in the Word. More time praying. More time with my family. Less screen time and new information at the speed of light. More taking things in. More writing things down. Less talking, more listening.

All the things I can do when I slow down.

Life goes by at an increasingly fast pace. What I'm (re)learning right now is how to take the slow road. As frustrating and tiring and incomprehensible as it seems right now, I think it's going to be worth it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Writer's Toolbox: Thesauruses I Love

I don't know about the rest of you writers in the crowd, but there are times when I struggle to get the right words to come out onto the page. The debate over using thesauruses amongst authors can be fierce. My personal opinion is that there is definitely a place and time to use them (they've saved me from missing deadlines on a few occasions), so long as a writer is careful not to overuse them. Because I do consider them an essential in my writer's toolbox of resources, I thought I would share the ones I make the most use out of and where you can find them. 1. Webster's New World Thesaurus (credit: @catpollockwrites IG, posted 8/24/2017 ) When you were in grade school, did your teachers ever hand out those monthly or bimonthly Scholastic book catalogs with all the age-appropriate books coming out that they wanted you to buy? That, my friends, is how I got a hold of my thesaurus. It's almost like mid-thirties me traveled back in time and whispered int
Post a Comment
Read more

Metaphors: Candles

I've recently fallen in love with candles. Since coming home from the World Race , I've bought at least one a month. My favorite candles are the ones that come in glass jars - because when they burn out, I can clean the remaining wax out and put the jars to other uses. Right now,  that means they get cleaned out and packed away in anticipation of my move to Flagstaff. But as I was lighting one tonight (vanilla spice... Thanksgiving smells? Yes, please!), I saw a metaphor for writing flickering away in the flame licking at the wick and melting the wax. I suppose it could be a metaphor for life in general, but since the theme of this blog is writing... Well, you do the math.
Post a Comment
Read more

[Five Minute Friday] Purpose

Fiber bars, strewn along the side of the road. There had to be at least a dozen of them, still in their wrappers and completely unopened. No box in sight. Really? That's about the reaction my younger sister and I had when we stumbled on them on our early morning run. Really? along with disgusted sighs about the wastefulness of it. These were the expensive ones, not a generic store brand that kind of tastes and kind of looks the same sometimes. So, when we weren't keeping an eye out for their box, we speculated about what had happened. And wondered how many more we were going to see before the end of our run. "Maybe they took one bite and thought they were gross," my sister said. "So they threw them out because they didn't want them anymore." I let out one of those disgusted sighs and nodded along with her theory. "Yeah, or they got in a huge fight, and threw them out in a fit of rage." "That's a possibility." And
9 comments
Read more