This post will be a little more on the personal side. I had started out since June to try to do a personal update once a week, but I chose to prioritize other things that were more pressing and got behind.
Last month I made a commitment to myself to complete a 31 Day challenge of blog posts. I think the idea really is to write a post every day, but with some of the posts that I wanted to write that wouldn’t have been possible, so I did miss a couple of days that I had to make up – not that I wasn’t writing on those days, just that I wasn’t able to finish. I had planned enough time to work ahead on posts before the month started, but life circumstances beyond my control happened and I was thrown into the month head-first.
Back in the day I probably would have said oh, things aren’t working out the way I wanted them to, I’ll just push the challenge to another time. Of course in some cases there are very valid reasons (not to be confused with excuses) to do that, but I’ve learned something over the years that nudged me to continue.
Most of the time it’s better to take the chance to practice than to wait for the perfect opportunity where you’re sure you’ll succeed.
To be honest, the month was pretty tough. I was running ragged and my family had to pick up some of my slack. We all worked our butts off, and were grateful when November hit.
And then suddenly, we began to see a little return on that investment – our traffic shot up 5,000%. We had asked God to bless the work and do with it whatever he wanted to do, so I guess we shouldn’t have been that surprised.
All year we’ve been working to refine our focus and simplify our lives as much as possible to make room for what matters. Since we came home to the Midwest at the end of April, we were planning toward leaving again this winter. While we had a lot of house projects and decluttering to do, we knew that we wanted to at least maintain momentum with videos and work toward a better blogging schedule as well.
As we continued to hone in on what was important, productivity increased and results compounded. For the first time in our lives clarity came easily.
Since June, we’ve known that we wanted our word for 2015 to be “relationships”. 2 years ago, even 1 year ago, our lives were far too crazy to feel like we could possibly try to focus on something like that, but I’m so blessed and truly amazed to say that the more we simplify, the more possibilities open up.
We believe in a God whose ways are more awesome than we can think or imagine, who is writing a story better than any we could author, and who invites us to join him in the creating.
The focus of this site, “making room for greatness“, is about lifestyle design: being intentional in creating a life of meaning – identifying what’s most important, and cutting out the excess that hinders and distracts – from physical stuff, to relationship stuff, to mindsets and methods.
We don’t know where this is all going, but we know that we are passionate about empowering people to live the life of abundance and beauty that God has for them. We’d love to get to know you!
Here is what our week looked like, and yes, we remembered to vote 🙂
We also started something new for the vlogs this week, but it was a little last-minute and no one has guessed the week’s challenge so far. I think it was too subtle, but we’ll get better!
