Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

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How to Find the True Rest Your Soul Needs {and a book giveaway!}

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Jennifer Dukes Lee is a stellar writer, and I have been grateful for each of her books and the wise, insightful, funny, real guidance and truth she offers. Her newest book, It’s All Under Control, releases today, and friends, this one resonated deeply with me because, well, I’m Triple Type A, right? I love me some control! Jennifer writes friend to friend, and her insights strike a solid note because they are gleaned from an authentic place of personal experience.

I’m thrilled to welcome Jennifer Dukes Lee to the blog today. AND I have a free copy of her beautiful new book to give away. Details on how to enter the drawing are at the end of the post.

Guest Post by Jennifer Dukes Lee

I know how this noisy world can get in the way of me hearing God’s still, small voice. So, in the past few years, I’ve been intentional about quieting the outer noise in my life.

My biggest challenge is silencing the inner chatter.

I know the value of resting in Jesus, but it’s like my brain won’t stop moving in fifteen different directions. Corralling my thoughts is like herding a nursery full of fork-toting toddlers who just learned how to walk and are weeble-wobbling their way toward electrical outlets on opposite sides of the room.

Take, for instance, one of the places where I go to escape the noise: my bathtub. I’ll toss a bath bomb in the water and sink into the warmth. There’s no TV. No iPhone. Yet even here, my mind is running on high gear. I often receive some of my best writing inspiration in the bathtub, which is why my friend Cheri gave me a set of child’s bathtub crayons. (Yes, part of my latest book, It’s All Under Control, was written on the walls of my tub.) So while it might look like I am resting, I’m actually still working.

God is reminding me that my brain needs rest as much as my body does. I loosen my mind by simply dwelling with him: “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4).

If I have a lot of noise around me—even in the form of the silent iPhone scroll—I can’t hear God.

My friend Lindsay Sterchi, mom of twin toddlers, learned the hard way what happens when she doesn’t get the rest she needs. She told me, “Without rest, I’m not very fun to be around— just ask my kids and husband. I get irritable way too quickly. I lose perspective on the bigger picture of life, and the little things seem bigger than they really are. I get in this fog where I’m going through the motions of life but not really living intentionally.”

The answer for her: finding rest in small pockets of time each day. “Rest means that when the kids nap, or after they’ve gone to bed, I’m not going to zone out on TV or scroll through social media, which might seem restful but ends up being draining.” Instead, she does something that feels life-giving—without feeling guilty. Her escapes: reading a book, journaling, or simply being still, alone with God and her thoughts.

Maybe your escape is Netflix, and if that’s the case, you do you. But make sure it gives you life instead of draining your energy.

No matter what: make rest a priority. It’s vital.

Resting in God serves two purposes: First, rest allows you to intentionally connect with God. God wants to meet with you, not simply to give you the day’s marching orders. He wants to be with you because he likes you.

Second, rest calms the noise around you so you can hear God’s clear direction.

Here are a few ideas to incorporate more rest into your life.

Instead of scrolling, go strolling. Everybody has time for rest. How can I be so sure? Because that’s the time we use to check social media. Put down your iPhone for the fifteen minutes you would’ve spent on Instagram and take a walk instead.

Don’t let your “yes” encroach on your rest. If you say yes to something new, evaluate everything else on your list to see what might have to go. Refuse to put rest on the altar of sacrifice.

Let your work assignments flow from soul realignments. If “everybody is looking for us,” our souls and agendas need realignment so we can hear clear directions from God.

Protect the freed-up time you have already created. God prunes all of us, but achievers try to immediately fill those pruned spaces. Protect the space that God created for you. Downtime is okay; in fact, it will make you more productive in the work you were designed to do.

Adapted from It’s All under Control: A Journey of Letting Go, Hanging On, and Finding a Peace You Almost Forgot Was Possible, by Jennifer Dukes Lee, releasing today from Tyndale House Publishers.

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Jennifer Dukes Lee is the wife of an Iowa farmer, mom to two girls, and an author. She loves queso and singing too loudly to songs with great harmony. Once upon a time, she didn’t believe in Jesus. Now, He’s her CEO. Jennifer’s newest book, It’s All Under Control, and a companion Bible study, are releasing today! This is a book for every woman who is hanging on tight and trying to get each day right―yet finding that life often feels out of control and chaotic.

I have an extra copy of Jennifer’s lovely new book It’s All Under Control that I would love to mail to one lucky recipient (continental U.S. only).

To enter the drawing, just leave a comment below telling me your favorite way to rest your mind, body and soul. I’ll randomly draw one name at 8 p.m. CT on Friday, September 21 (winner will be notified by email). 

 

How Doxology Can Change Everything

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Recently I talked to a friend who was having a hard day. It was nothing catastrophic; simply that the mounting demands of her work had taken their toll, and anxiety had gotten the best of her, leaving her feeling overwhelmed and stressed.

My advice to her was twofold. One: get outside; and two: practice doxology.

A few years ago I learned about a Japanese practice called shinrin-yoku, which roughly translates as “forest-bathing.” In Japan, whole forests are set apart for the sole purpose of inviting visitors to be present to the sights, sounds and scents of nature.

Studies show that spending even a few minutes outside each day in any kind of natural space – forested or otherwise — can have a profound impact on our physical health by lowering blood pressure, decreasing cortisol levels and increasing immune function.

But I’ve also found that “forest bathing” – or what we Nebraskans might more accurately call “plains bathing” – can also have a dramatic effect on our spiritual life and the state of our souls, especially when combined with doxology.

Earlier this summer I attended a women’s supper at a local Lutheran church, and at the close of the event, the host suggested we all sing the doxology together before going our separate ways.

“Huh? The what-ology?” I thought to myself, as the women around me began to sing:

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

After fake lip-syncing my way through the unfamiliar hymn that evening, I later learned that the word “doxology” comes from the Greek doxa, translated as “glory,” and logia, translated as “saying.” There are a number of different iterations, but in short, doxology is a fancy word for the simple practice of giving praise.

Since learning about the doxology, I now often sing it quietly to myself while I walk my dog (lucky for me, Josie makes sure I get my daily shinrin-yoku in). As we meander along the path, I notice and give thanks to God for the vibrant black-eyed Susans dotting the meadow, for the melodious call of the Oriole hidden amid the oak leaves, for the sleek fox I spot darting into the underbrush across the ravine.

Giving thanks to God while immersed in his creation not only settles my racing mind and brings me a measure of peace, it also offers much-needed perspective.

Photo by Noah Johnson

There is something deeply comforting in acknowledging and accepting my smallness in the face of nature’s breadth and depth. Noticing the intricate design of the blossoming Queen Anne’s lace at my feet and the vastness of the sky over my head reminds me of how fleeting and inconsequential most of my anxieties and concerns really are.

Singing the Christian doxology while I practice the Japanese shinrin-yoku under the wide Nebraska sky is a somewhat strange and unlikely spiritual discipline, but it’s become a favorite, near-daily personal routine. I’m always amazed that two simple practices – noticing and giving thanks – can make such a profound difference in my mental, physical and spiritual health.

Turns out, shinrin-yoku doxology worked for my friend too. A few hours after I’d talked to her, she reported back that she’d taken my advice. After a quiet walk around the lake and a few minutes spent gratefully cuddling a newborn kitten in the barn, she had returned to her desk with a lighter heart, a less frantic mind and a replenished soul.

This post first appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star on September 8, 2018.

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If you are visiting and enjoyed this post, you might consider signing up to receive my weekly blog posts in your in-box (or, if you’d prefer, my monthly newsletter, The Back Patio — a casual chat about books, podcasts, and fun, everyday life kinds of things). You can sign up over HERE, and as a gift for subscribing, I’ll also send you my free e-book, Learning to Listen to Your Soul: 5 Tips for Beginning a Daily Practice of Intentional Rest. 

Find and Be Found

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“Find, rather than seek.” When I read those four words in Joan Anderson’s memoir A Year by the Sea, they stopped me short.

I was sitting on the back deck of our family cabin at the edge of Lake Superior. I stopped reading mid-chapter, laid the open book face down on the arm of the Adirondack chair, and stared out over the expanse of gray water stretching like a metal sheet to the horizon.

Sitting in that chair, the sound of gentle waves at my feet, I was at the same time drawn to and troubled by Anderson’s words.

The problem was, her instructions seemed to contradict a statement Jesus makes to his disciples in the gospels of Matthew and Luke: “Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened to you.”

These words Jesus offers about seeking and finding have resonated with me for a long time. I am a seeker and a questioner. Part of this tendency is simply who I am; questioning is stamped on my DNA. But there is also a deeper force propelling these seeking, questioning tendencies in me, which is the fact that, for as long as I can remember, I’ve wrestled with a sense of restlessness, an unrequited yearning deep in my soul.

While I don’t believe God gives us everything we ask for, I have always found comfort in the words Jesus offers about seeking and finding. They’ve been a balm for my restless soul, a promise of sorts – reassurance that I will indeed someday find what I am looking for.

And yet, that day on the back deck, the cold breeze blowing off the lake, I couldn’t get Anderson’s words out of my head. “Find, rather than seek.” The more I pondered her words, the more I realized Anderson’s advice might not be in direct opposition to Jesus’ instructions to us after all.

I’ve spent most of my life relentlessly pursuing goals I’ve set. I accomplish one goal and then immediately fix my mind and heart on the next. I’ve pressed on, ticking item after item, ambition after ambition off an ever-growing list. My life has been built on striving, pushing toward something I couldn’t quite identify.

Turns out, in 48 years of seeking, I am finally beginning to find. And ironically, what I’m finding is that I already have, and have always had, what I’ve been seeking all along.

Everything we need is right here, right now, in this very moment. We find God, and we find who we are, by being present, by opening our eyes, ears, hearts, minds and souls to the here and now.  To find rather than seek means to uncover and to be present to what’s already here and to who we are, and have always been, in Christ.

What seeking ultimately reveals in the end is that we need not seek at all. Once we realize this — once we discover that we’ve already found and been found — we can rest in peace, understanding that what we’ve found is abundantly available to us.

Abundant love. Abundant peace. Abundant beauty. Abundant freedom. Abundant truth. Our finding is limited only by the boundaries we put it around it.

I sat in the Adirondack chair on the back deck for a long while that afternoon. In time, the clouds over the lake began to break. Bands of sunlight streamed down to the water as dragonflies, lacy wings glinting, swooped low over the lawn and arced back up again, snatching smaller insects from the air.

The sound of a hatchet cracking wood, my husband chopping logs for the fire, pierced the quiet. A hummingbird, jeweled ruby throat, visited the feeder, drinking long and deep from each plastic floret, wings whirring.

The breeze stilled. I unzipped my sweatshirt, leaned my head back against the wood, closed my eyes and felt the sun warm on my face.

We have all, each one of us, found.

We have all, each one of us, been found.

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Please consider signing up to receive my weekly blog posts in your in-box (or, if you’d prefer, my monthly newsletter, The Back Patio — a casual chat about books, podcasts, and fun, everyday life kinds of things). You can sign up over HERE, and as a free gift for subscribing, I’ll also send you my free e-book, Learning to Listen to Your Soul: 5 Tips for Beginning a Daily Practice of Intentional Rest. 

Raised to Life {a guest post and book giveaway}

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I was delighted to meet Patrice Gopo last spring at the Festival of Faith and Writing. She introduced her friend, Kate Motaung, in a little gathering celebrating Kate’s book release, and even though I didn’t know Patrice, I was moved and touched by the beautiful words she spoke in honor of her friend.

When I saw that Patrice recently released a book herself, I went out on a limb and messaged her on Instagram if ask if, on the off chance, she would be interested in guest posting over here, because I was really excited to introduce you to her voice and a bit of her story. Lucky us, she said yes! Her writing is at the same time quietly powerful, eloquent and lyrical, and I know you will find her as compelling as I do.

Please welcome Patrice Gopo to the blog today, and be sure to enter a comment at the end of this post for a chance to receive a free copy of her beautiful book, All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way. 

Essay by Patrice Gopo

In the nightmare I find my toddler face up in a shallow pool. Her wide eyes haunt me. Her clothes balloon with water. I lean over, yank her out, and hold her lifeless body in my arms. I wake, open-mouthed, to the din of absolute silence.

Now alert in the night, I can split dream from reality. I know my daughter sleeps close by. But I see those vacant eyes. The limp body. The spreading circle of damp on my imagined clothes.

***

I am eleven years old when my pastor dunks me into a baptistery filled with water. Raised to walk in new life, I hear when pulled to the surface. A large towel greets me as I exit, my clothes heavy on my limbs, a puddle forming at my feet. Beneath the soft fabric, my skin feels the cool air, and my body begins to shake.

In the future words gush with great force. Well-intentioned opinions flood my mind and make my lungs burn for breath. Taught as tenets of this faith, I hear instructions about being submissive, respectful, and the keeper of the home. An ancient role, I’m told, assigned from the time the Tigris and Euphrates rushed through Eden.

There are things I will come to regret. The way I shrank myself, the way I silenced my voice, the way I believed that idea to be truth. But I will not regret that moment of immersion.

***

I gave birth to my daughter in a tub of warm water. She slipped from the sac of fluid within me to the birthing pool surrounding me. Below where I crouched and pushed, she could have remained there for seconds, minutes, maybe more, her body attached to a pulsating cord.

Instead, the midwife’s hands sank below the surface, cupped my girl’s wrinkled body, and guided the fresh baby to her mother. Thin skin pressed against my wet chest as I waited for a scream that never came. Just the flutter of a heartbeat and a soft mew.

“The gentle birth,” the midwife said while she drained the tub. “Water babies don’t really cry.”

***

Sometimes I daydream about my girl far in the future when she is big and grown. She stands on the bank of a great river or walks barefoot beside the ocean’s many lapping tongues. Her wide eyes stare into a blurry distance beyond the range of my imagination.

And I think how around her, words can rise. How jagged twists on a faith I have handed her may one day creep close and soak her shoes, her clothes, her being. But my daughter, I dream she floats in the river current, breathes with the ocean’s waves. Her strong arms cut through walls of water in a way even her mother never knew.

Why did I believe for so long? Because I didn’t know there existed a way to stop and still remain.

***

In the bright of morning, after the time for nightmares is over, I hear my toddler’s waking cries. Later we walk past a fountain. Her squeals prod me to stare with her at slim arcs of water splashing into the pool below. I loosen my grip on her hand and watch her touch the slight spray of what she has known since her beginning.

(This post originally appeared in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and is used with permission)

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Patrice Gopo is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way, an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. Her book is a Fall 2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Please visit patricegopo.com/book to learn more.  Facebook: @patricegopowrites; Instagram/Twitter: @patricegopo.

Patrice has graciously offered to give away a copy of her beautiful book, All the Colors We Will See. To be entered to win, simply leave a comment on this post — tell me the best book you’ve read in the last six months.

One name will be randomly drawn on Wednesday, August 29 at 8 p.m. Central Time, and I will notify the winner by email.  

 

 

The Spiritual Discipline of Driving with the Radio Off {and how it might just change the world}

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Yesterday, as I backed out the driveway on my way to attend an evening event, I clicked on the radio to catch the last bit of news for the day. I’m not a big music person, but when I’m driving I’ll often listen to the news or a talk show on NPR, much to my teenagers’ chagrin, and during my hour-long commute to and from Omaha once a week for my part-time job, I typically have a podcast playing in one earbud.

Yesterday, though, a few seconds after I’d turned the radio on, I clicked it off again and instead rolled down my window and drove the rest of the way to my destination in silence.

A brief shower had swept through the south part of town. As I drove I breathed in the scent of rain steaming off the hot pavement. I let the wind have its way with my hair and felt the humid breeze on my face. As I idled at a traffic light, I heard the steady whine of crickets in the field and the piercing call of a red-tailed hawk from its perch atop a telephone pole.

I realized it had been a long time since I’d driven with the radio off and the earbuds out of my ears.

It was only a 20-minute drive from my house to where I was headed, but when I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed my whole demeanor had changed. My mind was free of clanging thoughts. My pulse was slow and steady, my breathing even, my hands relaxed on the steering wheel.

Later that night, when I mentioned in an Instagram post how much I had enjoyed my silent drive, a friend commented that a year or so ago she’d made a conscious decision to drive with the radio off. “It’s amazing how much more margin I have in my life now,” she said.

Initially I was puzzled by her comment. After all, 15 or 20 minutes of silence is but a drop in the bucket of a typical busy day. How could so little quiet create “more margin” in her life overall, I wondered?

As I thought about my own quiet drive just a few hours before, though, I recalled how I’d slid out of the driver’s seat and ambled unhurriedly across the parking lot, noticing, as I walked, the clouds billowing on the horizon.

I remembered how I’d paused for a few seconds to listen to a meadowlark trill from the prairie grass nearby.

I considered the fact that I’d been noticeably less distracted in my interactions that night, more present to the people with whom I’d engaged.

Our lives are filled with a lot of noise. The clatter of the television, radio and social media. The barrage of advertising. The beeps, dings and ringtones from our smart phones, alerting us to a text, a Facebook comment, a tweet. The back-to-back-to-back meetings at work, the conference calls, the webinars.

So accustomed are we to its constancy, we don’t realize how much this relentless noise and distraction taxes our bodies, minds and souls.

We also don’t notice how much space this constant noise occupies, how it is infused into every facet of our days, how it even impacts how we move and who we are in this world.

Spending even a few minutes in silence has an immediate and discernable impact on our own physical and mental health, to be sure. But as our less distracted, more present selves step back into the world at large, it’s clear the few minutes of silence we take for ourselves also have a ripple effect, reverberating from ourselves into our environment and out toward those around us…perhaps reverberating from them still further, on and on, in wider and wider circles.

It seems, then, that perhaps the few minutes of silence we take for ourselves aren’t just for ourselves after all. As our calmer, more present, more attentive selves step back into our families, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our communities, those few minutes of silence are making way for a kinder, more compassionate, more spacious world.

…So tell me: do you ever drive with the radio off? What’s your favorite way to enjoy a few minutes of silence? 

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Please consider signing up to receive my weekly blog posts in your in-box (or, if you’d prefer, my monthly newsletter, The Back Patio — a casual chat about books, podcasts, and fun, everyday life kinds of things). You can sign up over HERE, and as a free gift for subscribing, I’ll also send you my free e-book, Learning to Listen to Your Soul: 5 Tips for Beginning a Daily Practice of Intentional Rest.