What We Chat About on This Episode:
~The new book Karen co-authored with Ruth Schwenk, what readers can expect, and what led to this being their next work
~The deep joy that can come even in the hardest of life’s circumstances; the practices Karen and Ruth have put in place which enable them to experience this joy
~The four sections of the workbook and what led them to set it up that way
~Assessing whether or not what we are spending our time in is lining up with the priorities we say we have
~Assessing what God-given passions you have that go along with His call on your life
~Tips, tricks, and tools that help you find your follow through on your passions and priorities
~Advice for how to live your everyday with forethought, planning, and intentionality
~The crucial importance of making prayer a priority
~Teaching people how to treat you by your behavior and boundaries
~The happiness we find when we invest our hearts, souls, minds, and strength in the right things
~Having boundaries in place for our phone usage
~Cultivating a life-giving routine of both productivity and rest
~The power of taking several minutes a day to sit in silence and think nothing
~A few important questions to ask yourself at the end of the day to prepare yourself well for the next day
~Assessing everything that is currently on your plate and whether or not it is time to do some plate-scraping
~What it takes to obtain wisdom
~The important part the fear of the Lord has to play in all this
~And more!
Inspiring Quotes to Remember:
“We wrote this book on enjoying your life in a season of very hard circumstances for each of us. To look at our circumstances, you wouldn’t have thought we would be happy. But it wasn’t situational happiness that we were experiencing. It was deep joy in knowing that none of what we were going through surprised God. He knew we would go through it, and He promised to be with us. Despite some pretty dire circumstances, we were still seeing these pockets of joy.”
“We started to ask ourselves what it was we had put in place, what we had done, what God had taught us over the years as adults, that had positioned us to still feel like life was worth living and to still discover joy despite the circumstances all around us. That is what led to the writing of this book.”
“When it comes to living our priorities, all of us have two things in our lives: we have relationships and we have responsibilities, or people and projects. We tend to lean to one or the other extreme, so finding the proper perspective and learning to manage that tension is what we address in the first section of the book.”
“God has wired you with passions, with interests and talent and spiritual gifts. He has a calling on your life, something that you should be doing and could be doing for the Kingdom.”
“We need to be praying about our days, saying, ‘Lord, there are going to be times today when I need to get work done, times when I instead need to tend to a human being. Would You please help me to order my day in such a way that I get my work done without neglecting my people? And would You tap me on the heart if I need to stop what I am doing and tend to a person and also nudge me when I need to ignore that text message and get my work done instead?’”
“You teach people how to treat you. You teach them by what you allow and what you don't allow. We want to love and serve people, but we can’t be at everybody’s beck and call. We really need to have boundaries in place, best practices, and ways to free up time for the things that really matter.”
“We so often think happiness comes from money, notoriety, possessions, position, or popularly. But research shows that it comes more from feeling like, a the end of the day, we invested in something that mattered. But so often we are just spending our time on things that don’t matter - like scrolling our phones. If we do not have time limits on that scrolling, we will waste countless hours each week on meaningless content.”
“What really makes our lives enriched is investing into things that matter, investing our hearts, minds, souls, and strength into making someone else’s life better. Listening to that neighbor who just lost their spouse and encouraging and doing something nice for them rather than just ingesting fluff all day long goes a long way.”
“We don’t rest because we’re tired and we deserve a break. We rest so that we can refocus, we can relax, and then we can reconnect and be rekindled in a way that we can then go back and tackle life.”
“I heard a brain expert on a podcast say that we need 17 minutes a day of silence where we think nothing. I have made that my practice now and find that having that 17 minutes of silence a day with a clear brain has really helped me to be able to then jump back into my day with a different perspective now that I have literally had a brain break.”
“I would encourage people to make sure that the things that are on their plates are either a relationship or a responsibility that God has placed there. And, if they aren’t, you’ll need to do some major plate-scraping.”
“If we really want to properly live out our priorities, we first need to obtain wisdom. And the first step in obtaining wisdom is to fear the Lord. Our success begins with understanding the fear of the Lord and living it out daily and returning to it when we stray. It doesn’t depend on applying all the latest time management techniques we can find, even though those can be helpful. Our success begins with understanding the fear of the Lord that leads to wisdom.”
“Wisdom helps us to make choices in our day and in our relationships and in our responsibilities that help us to live our priorities and love our life.”
Resources Mentioned:
Where You Can Find Karen:
Substack: KarenEhman.com
Twitter: @karen_ehman
Pinterest: @karenehmanofficial
Facebook: Karen Ehman
Instagram: @karenehman
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