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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

rest

Learning to Listen to Your Soul: 5 Tips for Beginning a Daily Practice of Intentional Rest {Free E-Book!}

July 10, 2018 By Michelle

Oh, summer…a time of lazy afternoons by the pool, mystery novel in hand; days at the beach, drowsing to the sound of the surf, warm sun on your back; evenings on the back patio, sipping Chardonnay as the fireflies spark.

Wait…what? Your summer doesn’t look exactly like that? Yeah…mine either.

Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference in Wisconsin, my husband Brad was at a conference in Washington, D.C., and our two boys stayed home by themselves for the first time ever. In the 48 hours we were out of town, a water main burst in front of our house, the city had to dig up half our front yard, there was talk that the 50-year-old honey locust tree might have to be removed to get at the pipe (thankfully that didn’t happen), the dog you-know-whated on the rug and a son who shall not be named cleaned it up with the bleach spray he found under the kitchen cabinet, and, to top it off, all my homebound flights were cancelled due to weather, so I ended up having to rent a car to drive 9 hours back to Lincoln. Oh, and my sister and my nephew were due to arrive the next day…and sleep in the guest room where the dog you-know-whated and which was now flaunting freshly bleached carpet.

That’s summer for reals.

Which is why we all need to make a little more time for intentional rest, right?

I have a solution, and clearly I need to be first in line to take my own advice!

My new e-book, Learning to Listen to Your Soul: 5 Tips for Beginning a Daily Practice of Intentional Rest, will help you:

  • Understand the mind, body and soul benefits of intentional rest
  • Learn how to step away from busyness and productivity in order to hear the quiet whispers of your soul
  • Integrate five concrete steps into your daily routine that will help you establish a short but impactful daily practice of silence, reflection, and rest.

I’ve been practicing daily intentional rest for as little as five minutes a day for more than a year now, and I can assure you from first-hand experience that this little tweak to your day can and will have a profound impact on your whole life.

Five minutes isn’t much…but it’s enough to change everything.

If you’d like to know how you, too, can integrate the practice of intentional rest into your day, I’d like to send you a free downloadable copy of Learning to Listen to Your Soul. You can sign up HERE. 

I would love for you (and I) to have a lazy summer spent lounging under a beach umbrella, but if that’s not your reality, the next best thing would be to learn to how truly rest amid the crazy. My hope is that this little e-book will help you do exactly that.

As Ruth Haley Barton writes in Invitation to Solitude and Silence, “The presence of God is poured out most generously when there is space in our souls to receive him.”

Together, let’s make the space in our souls to receive the presence of God, this summer and beyond.

::

Friends, if you already subscribe to my blog posts or to my monthly newsletter by email: you should have received a link to download my new e-book, Learning to Listen to Your Soul, on Monday in your in-box. Drop me an email if you did not receive it, and I will get it right out to you. Thank you for reading and subscribing!

Filed Under: rest, True You Tagged With: rest, True You

Weekend One Word: Close

October 1, 2016 By Michelle

How to Come Close to God

Do you realize that God wants nothing more than to be in relationship with you? It’s true. He doesn’t need you to be good or perfect or on your best behavior. He doesn’t even require that you confess your sins in order to be in relationship with him. He simply wants you to walk toward him and enter into his embrace. He makes the first move; he extends the invitation. But he leaves it up to us as to whether or not we will answer yes. He patiently waits for us to turn back toward him, where he is waiting with open arms.

So what gets in the way of our coming closer to him? What’s stopping us from being in a close, personal, intimate relationship with God?

Busyness.

Distraction.

An incessant drive to produce and accomplish.

An inability to rest.

We miss God’s invitation to come closer because we don’t make time amid our busy, noisy, go-go-go world to stop and listen for his voice. As Shelly Miller says in her beautiful book Rhythms of Rest (stay tuned next week for more about this book and a giveway!), “God is patiently waiting for you to slow down so he can express his love for you.”

God’s love, his invitation, is there. It sits like an unopened envelope in a mailbox. “Come closer,” he invites. And he waits for us to slow, to listen, to say yes.

Filed Under: One Word, rest Tagged With: James 4:8, rest, Rhythms of Rest, Shelly Miller

On Painting Furniture, Embracing Quirk and Resting

May 19, 2014 By Michelle

First, let me promise you that I have not morphed into a DIY blogger overnight. If you read this post from last week you know that I am taking a “rest” from my typical writing and, on some days, from writing at all.

I spent a fair amount of time on the lounge chair reading this these last few days, but I also got busy doing two of my favorite non-writing activities: gardening and painting. I got good and dirty spreading mulch and trimming back the decimated holly shrubs. And then, I took to the furniture.

I blame The Nester. Do you know The Nester? She has a fancy real name – Myquillin Smith — but most people know her as The Nester. She wrote a book, which I borrowed from Deidra and inhaled in two sittings, called The Nesting Place: It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect to Be Beautiful, and I got all inspired to try my hand at imperfectly perfectly beautiful.

So on Saturday morning I tossed a drop cloth on the driveway and hauled out two of my grandparent’s ladder back chairs, their old marble-top side table, and another dingy side table that currently holds a motley hodgepodge of knickknackery, and started painting.

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These are my "before" pictures. Isn't it so very DIY of me to have remembered to take "before" pictures?

These are my “before” pictures. Isn’t it so very DIY of me to have remembered to take “before” pictures?

At one point Noah stood on the front stoop and asked, “So are you planning to paint every single piece of furniture in our house white?” and I said, “Yes. Yes, that is the plan.” That was the extent of our conversation, but I got the distinct impression that he was not in favor of The Plan.

I painted for the entire day on Saturday. I painted for so long, my hamstrings hurt like I’d sprinted the 100 meter dash fourteen times in twelve minutes, yet all I’d done was crouch on my haunches on the driveway for six hours.

The next day, I hauled the boys to the brand-new Home Goods store in town to look for some “quirk.” Now. If you read The Nester’s book, you’ll learn all about quirk. Quirk, as far as I understand it, are the extra little funkatudenous details that make a house uniquely, creatively your own.

Turned out, I have no quirk. Not an once of quirk. At least in my house. I suspect I might have quirk in my personality, but that’s another story.

So I bought some quirk.

First I bought a not-quirky lamp for my new now-white marble-top table. And then I bought a copper camera. Yes, that’s right, a faux camera made of pottery and painted a slick copper. As I was standing in line with my new non-quirky lamp and my totally quirky copper pottery camera, Rowan turned to me aghast. “Please tell me,” he said, all haughty with his eyebrows raised, “that you’re not actually buying that camera; I thought that was, like, a joke or something.”

I bought the camera anyway, because let me tell you, I know good quirk when I see it and I know a nine-year-old boy wearing a Mario Bros. tee shirt and shin pads and soccer cleats in the middle of Home Goods does not know quirk. Or at least the kind of quirk I’m interested in.

So. With my freshly painted ladder back chairs (one of which I’d dusted off from the basement, and the other which had been holding 14,000 pieces of junk in Rowan’s room), I created a sweet little seating area – for afternoon tea and a plate of warm scones, if you wish. Or, more likely, Tupperwares of goldfish and Capri Sun Roaring Waters juice bags. But, you know, whatever.

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The little side table in the dining room is modestly improved with a few coats of white paint. I call it “Still Life with Random Telephone.”

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But the piece de resistance is the marble top table. I mean, come on – tell me the six hours of painting and the throbbing haunches were worth it for this? Right? Yes? And does it not totally help that the handle of the bottom drawer is now screwed on straight? I don’t need to tell you that I lived with the handle all cock-a-mamie like that for the last 13 years, do I?

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And did you notice the quirk? People, look at that awesome quirk. Does the copper camera not make the entire ensemble?

Yeah, baby, I am Nesting it up, I tell you. I am Nesting and Resting.

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Okay, so I did learn a thing or two in this process. Surprisingly, this painting furniture on the driveway is one way I rest. And that’s okay, I realized. At first I felt guilty. I should be RESTING, I thought to myself as I wrenched off the lid of the paint can. Resting, I assumed, needed to look like this:

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But no. No, no, no, not true. Swinging on the hammock with a dog at his feet is Noah’s way to rest, but it doesn’t mean it has to be mine. Rest doesn’t necessarily entail a book or a nap or an hour-long session with the massage therapist. Rest, I realized as I squatted on my haunches for six hours straight,  can be whatever relaxes you, energizes you or refuels your creativity.

Turns out, this is how I often rest best:

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I rest best while my mind is still and my hands are at work. And then I take a shower, use a nail brush to scrub off the 14 million paint splatters on every inch of my body, get dressed in clean clothes, and finally collapse on the couch to admire my handiwork across the room.

So tell me, how do you rest best? And seriously, be honest, do you like the copper camera? Because I still have the receipt, and Rowan would NOT be disappointed if I returned it. 

Filed Under: rest Tagged With: DIY, rest, The Nester

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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