Back in January, Tim and I did our annual Blue Day – a day to review our direction, plan, and dream for this coming year (we explain this idea more in our ebook “Fight With Me“). We also chose a theme word to focus on for the year. For 2019, our word is Enough.
For me, Enough will be lived out in several ways this year:
- I have enough. This will be a year of trusting that God will provide us the finances we need. This will also be a year of using what I already have. When I look around my home, I see books that I’ve meant to read over the years and canvases I’ve meant to paint but are all collecting dust. Thanks to some generous moms in my community, I also have two boxes of yarn waiting to be knit. Instead of heading “out there” to get something new, I will use what I already have at home first.
- I do enough. I will remind myself of this when I am tempted to push myself beyond my capabilities.
- I am enough. When things don’t go the way I expect, I often blame myself for not being enough somehow. This year, I hope to practice rewriting that inner narrative.
- “Enough!” There are circumstances and situations where I am invited to meet someone else’s needs – places where others don’t have enough. In particular, there is a young homeless man that I have gotten to know since last spring and it’s been on my heart to help advocate for him. I’m doing my best to follow God’s promptings each step while trusting that what I’m doing is enough.
For Tim, Enough looks like trusting God with our business. Businesses go through busy and slow times, and in the midst of going through several slow months, he’s been challenged to believe that we have and will have enough work. In those slow times he sometimes wonders if he’s done enough. On those days, after putting in a full day’s work and doing his best, he is invited to believe that he has done enough, even though the results do not seem like enough.
In business it’s also easy to look around at the “success” that other businesses are enjoying and compare yourself with them. In those times, Tim is challenged to believe that the business God has given us, the number and type of clients, the growth we have (regardless of how much or little), and the skillset that we have is enough.
I was reading in Zephaniah (The Message version) when I came across this verse: “Content with who they are and where they are, unanxious, they will live at peace” (3:13). This has become my prayer for the year: That as we live into all that is Enough, we would be content with who we are and where we are, that we would be unanxious and live at peace.
