TheLionRampant.net

On the whole, I seem pretty put together. My house is usually decently clean considering I have two little boys who love to scale the heights of anything and toss books off of bookshelves. We have clean underwear. I even get in a bit of reading now and then. But underneath the supposed serenity sometimes that breaks down and I’ve discovered I deal with chaos unhealthily by 1) mindlessly filling up my time and 2) not spending my time well positively.

This means that I don’t get on the floor, at my children’s level nearly enough. I have to train myself to really, really listen and absorb the chatter and noise and mess, so that I can have genuine encounter moments more. And I’ve been convicted that I need to spend a bit less time online — no more obsessive checking of facebook, twitter and words with friends on my phone. I don’t even spend *good* time online; I’m much less active on on places where you can actually interact with people — say, blogs and Mothering by Grace — than on mind-sucking wastes of time like facebook, watching too much TV, and going through classifieds for great furniture deals.

I don’t want this to be a post that’s a sort of pull-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps and stop being addicted to the media. Bryce and I are putting a few things into place to start to reshape our daily disciplines so we interact with each other more, with our kids more intentionally, and have energy to give to others. So we’re going to go to bed on time. We’re going to read our Bibles and pray. And gasp, we’re going to exercise (once ski season hits, this will not be hard). So today, we put the kids in the stroller and walked around Liberty Park. It meant we were awake enough to not have to have a cup of coffee and that helps too.

But even if we make it a habit, there’s lots underneath the surface that has to change. Much more than just switching the routines. And for that — for actually using my time well — I need help beyond myself.

First let me wave to all my friends out there! Hi! We’ve been gone ALL SUMMER LONG. It’s nuts. It’s crazy. We touched both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans this summer in efforts to do some fundraising for RUF. And I don’t think we recouped our costs yet — but that’s another story.

What I want to actually blog about — yes, blog you say? I know, you’re staring in disbelief given I haven’t posted in 4 months! — is Ministry of Reality Mondays. Some of my lovely online friends over at Mothering by Grace, a parenting forum I belong to, are starting a weekly blog round-up where the focus is:

“is being able to be REAL about life. Homes are not always (not *usually* even!) spotless, children are not always dressed adorably, children do not always “behave,” marriage is hard, and there aren’t simple answers to hard questions. Being honest about all of this makes it easier (in my opinion) to live life… because we can ASK for help about problems we aren’t covering up. We can be encouraged by others’ stories of surviving similar seasons and trials.”

Being real, being vulnerable. . . in that we can ask for help from others, be approachable when others need our help. In the Ministry of Reality we can acknowledge just how dependent we are on God’s grace daily, and (hopefully, prayerfully, fallenly) show what that dependence looks like.

I’m excited to start and since the kids are waking up from their naptime, it’s likely to be Ministry of Reality Tuesday — because tonight is Reality *show* (hubby and I watch HGTV’s Design Star the night after on Hulu, so shhhh no spoilers!!) night. So I’ll be back tomorrow, complete with links to other bloggers.