When our plates are full, how does capacity grow?

the monthly letter

Today I’m reminded of last March at this time — vignettes suspended in my mind as if in a viewfinder.

The night I curled up next to Nate on the couch when he said, “babe, they canceled the NCAA tournament. It appears to be that far-reaching.”

Zoom calls with my family from Ohio — and no schedule impediments to planning them. We never did zoom before quarantine, but the thought of staying at home made us reach across state lines for each other.

Grocery runs where I spotted the first masks — studying eyes and hairlines to see if I knew the strangers behind the cloth— and skittish shoppers. None of us knew a world like the one in which we now found ourselves.

Easter at home in our jammies.

Just days before the world’s forced slow, I was reading a book about slowing our lives — canceling meetings, reorienting our schedules to match our limits, taking time to look into beauty and not just note it in the rearview. A year later and I notice: some of us lived a life that we had been telling ourselves that we needed, for a time … we sat around the table until the candles burned low, we took long walks in the woods, we played board games and discovered new things about each other over puzzles and art projects.

We got familiar with our four walls and the faces that matter most and our human limitations, again.

And others of us experienced this season as a crushing kind of loss — whether it was of jobs, family members, cherished connecting points, graduations, and wedding receptions. For many, with this year came great pain.

But for almost all of us: as life slowed, fear grew.

Activities were pruned but stress mounted.

Home became central, but home hosted a new kind of hard.

This past year revealed: no matter what changes in our day, our schedule, our goals, our time management, what happens within our minds informs our life, our rest, and our calm. 

We can’t quarantine from our minds.

I could have one or zero children, no job responsibilities, and all the wealth to comfortably manage the externals of my life — and my capacity could still be less than a working-class mother of twelve.

This year leveled the playing field. Everyone’s circumstances changed, and yet the stress evenly mounted, anger came unhinged, anxiety overwhelmed.

This year revealed to us: our capacity is less connected to what we manage in a day than it reflects what happens within our minds.

This past weekend, I received information that sent me into fear and dread in a flash of a second. I missed the three main items for which I went to Costco. I can’t remember the route I drove home. I saw my children’s mouths moving but heard no sound. I cooked dinner and bought eyeglasses and read stories to eager toddlers, all while my mind traveled elsewhere.

My mind drove me that day. I was merely a passenger on the train of my thoughts, destined for nowhere.

Many days our minds drive us without us knowing.

We assess situations, make decisions, interact with friends, field a piece of news mostly unthinking. Except, we’re always thinking.

Always thinking.

There is a world between my two ears that informs how I see my children, what I notice about Nate, how I react to a neighbor’s complaint or a friend’s throwaway comment or a thread I read online. Six thousand thoughts per day pass through my mind, and yet when I feel overwhelmed, I run to tweak my schedule, or I attempt to duck a fear-paralyzing situation.

We can manage the minutiae of our schedule and multi-task more minutes. We can say “no” to more things and “yes” to less. We can manage our time in minutes, not hours. None of these things are bad, but if our interior life remains unexamined, we are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, pointlessly managing the superficial, while an iceberg lurks in the distance.

My foggy Saturday, the sense of overwhelm that wants to haunt me, the sinking feeling of stress … these things are impacted by my circumstances — but not driven by them.

My mind drives my day. And it defines my capacity.

Those 6,000 thoughts that brain experts say we have during each day claim a significant amount of life real estate, informing what I think about God and what I think about me … and, if we’re honest, they’re mostly unexamined.

I am desperate for a Savior of more than my schedule and my dreams, my children, and their futures.

I need a Savior for my mind … my 6,000.

{Did you know He offers to transform us by the renewing of our mind. (Romans 12:2)}

And the more renewal I experience in the world-of-my-life that no one sees, the more my capacity grows. (On many days with seven kids, I have a greater capacity to engage with what He’s put in front of me than I did when I had two children and much less responsibility. It’s as if He is showing me with my life that  when my mind gets renewed, it creates space.)

I will leave you with this picture:

There is a Man, a God-Man. He doesn’t tiptoe around the minefield in our heads, nor does He charge through it dictatorially. In His walk through my mind, He dignifies.

He knows there’s a history to what I think and what I feel — years needing tending, secrets needing His touch, fears needing to be held in the night, not sermonized. He sees all 43 years of my life in one glance and can hold both the little-girl me and the mom, as He softly restores my mind. He heals while He holds … me … and my thoughts.

Isaiah 26:3 gives us the way through this minefield in our heads: trust. But we big people, just like when we were once babes, only learn trust by being held, by having our needs exposed to Him, by the Father’s touch.

Friends, your life and mine need less time management and more time winning back our minds.

(This note was a teaser. We’re talking more about capacity and renewing those 6,000 over here on SOAR. I also wrote a book about it if this email is niggling your insides and you want to dive in deeper.)

Until next time,

Sara