Caring for Myself Body and Soul 26: Retreating

The greatest desire of my life is to show grace to all--to my loved ones at home, to my family and friends and neighbors all over the world,. But in order for my life to be a reflection of God's grace, I've must soak up God's grace for myself.

And so, this week, I'm on retreat.  I'm at The Cove in Asheville, North Carolina, where this scene greeted me just after I got out of my car:

Then I registered for the retreat and stepped out onto the back deck of the building, where this is what I saw:

O, Lord, we praise you for your excellent greatness.

I'm so grateful for this chance to be away, to be encouraged, to heed the words of the Lord:

"Be still and know that I am God" (Psalm 48:10).

When was the last time you got away on retreat?

This post is the twenty-sixth entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 25: Eating less, drinking more

In my pursuit of doing a better job of taking care of myself body and soul, I've found a simple practice that's good for both my body AND my soul.  To tell the truth, I've found that lots of things that are good for my body are also good for my soul, but this one especially fills that bill:

I'm eating less and drinking more.

Before you start thinking that I mean I'm no having two-martini lunches à la Mad Men, let me show you what I'm drinking:

Simple herbal tea.  Nothing too fancy--my favorite so far is Celestial Seasonings Peppermint, which costs about 10 cents per cup.  I simply use my Keurig as a hot water dispenser--no muss, no fuss.

What I've discovered is that sometimes when I think I'm hungry, I'm actually thirsty.  A drink of water is always good, but these cool days I often want a hot drink.  Herbal tea is the perfect thing to satisfy.

And I've found that having a cup of tea in my hand makes for just the right state of mind, too.  You can't run around madly when you're holding a cup of hot tea.  It's more of a sit-quietly-for-a-few-minutes kind of drink.  And those few minutes of quietness are definitely good for my soul.

Are you a tea drinker?  If so, what's your favorite variety?  Please share!

This post is the twenty-fifth entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 23: Facing the scale

I hate to write this post.  In fact, I hate to think about this subject.  But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it.

I needed to lose some weight.

Let me stop right there and say that I have great sympathy for those who need to lose a great deal of weight.  I'm lucky: I've been fairly slender all of my adult life.  I'm a small person.

But I was not slender as a teenager.  In fact, I weighed more at age 16 than I weighed as an adult nine months' pregnant.  And no, I'm not exaggerating.  I know that being overweight is no fun.

Even for slender persons, though, sometimes the number on the scale creeps up.  Maintaining a desirable weight is easier for some than others, but it requires attention from nearly all of us.

I'd just stopped paying attention to how much I ate.  My clothes had become uncomfortably snug. Meanwhile, I turned 50, and I knew that losing weight would soon become more difficult than it has been in the past.

So as part of this month of taking care of myself, I got on the scale.  There it stands in my bathroom, patiently waiting to be used.  I'd been ignoring it.  The truth is that I just didn't want to know what the scale said.

Over the years I've discovered that I'm comfortable and healthy if my weight stays within a 10-pound range.  If it goes below the bottom of that range (which hasn't happened very often), I'm a bit too thin.  If it goes above the top number of that range, I'm too heavy.  I've learned that obsessing about a particular weight is bad for me, body and soul.  Using the ten-pound range as an indicator works better.

As you can imagine, I discovered that the number was above the top of the range.   So I did what I've been needing to do.  I stopped eating so much, stepped up my exercising, and lost five pounds.  It would be great if I could lose three or four more pounds, but at least now I'm back into good territory.

Now I'd like to know about you.  Do you struggle to maintain an ideal weight?  If not, do you have any secrets?  Do you weigh yourself regularly?  Please share your experience!

This post is the twenty-third entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 22: Getting some fashion help

This month I'm focusing on caring for myself body and soul, and today I'll share with you one of the most fun things I've done for myself in a long time.

I'm getting some fashion help.

This is a photo my husband snapped of me a few weeks ago when I turned 50.  Not bad for a 50-year-old.  But what to wear?  I like to look nice, but I've never had a well-developed sense of fashion.  And after a couple of years of suffering with plantar fasciitis and wearing athletic shoes almost every day, I'm rusty at putting things together.

I need help.

The first place I looked for help, of course, was to blogs.  My friend Cyndi Spivey writes an amazing blog on beauty and fashion, Walking in Grace and Beauty.  She's helped me a lot.

With Cyndi's encouragement, I enrolled in StitchFix.  Have you heard of StitchFix?  It's an online personal styling service.  For a very modest price, you can have your very own personal stylist who will choose clothes for you to try (no purchase required).  You can read all about it here.  This service is amazing!

When I got my latest StitchFix box, though, I wondered if my stylist had sent things to the wrong person.  She wrote "I chose a couple of burgundy pieces for you because I think they'd go great with your hair color and skin tone."  Huh?  Was she talking to me?  I know burgundy is popular this Fall, but I never thought it would look good on me.

I used to have fairly bright red hair, but as I've gotten older, my hair has gotten darker.  Now it's auburn, and what do you know?  Burgundy actually does look good with my hair color and skin tone!

Here I paired the burgundy cardigan over a black tank with grey houndstooth ankle pants.  These pants would look great with heels, but they also work well with these loafers, and my feet can handle the flats much better.

Then I remembered this wonderful scarf my husband gave me a couple of years ago.  It works great with the burgundy cardigan worn with skinny jeans and black boots!

Then I remembered this plaid shirt that's been hanging in my closet.  It works with the burgundy cardigan, too.

Question:  How on earth do fashion bloggers take such great photos of themselves??  Obviously it's not by taking iPhone pics of themselves in a mirror.

The amazing thing is that I was able to quickly and easily put together three outfits that I never would considered simply because I got some fashion help.  Left to my own, I limited myself to wearing the same things over and over.

Do you enjoy putting outfits together?  Have you ever tried a service like StitchFix?

**I'm joining Lindsey at The Pleated Poppy for What I Wore.**

This post is the twenty-second entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 20: Exchanging rules for guidelines

I started the month of October planning to post every day for 31 days on the topic of taking care of myself, body and soul.

And if you plan to post every day for 31 straight days, you must absolutely, without fail, post every day for 31 days.  You can't quit.  You can't fail.  You must follow through.  Right?

Wrong.

If I'm completely honest with myself and with you, I recognize that I chose to write about self-care because I need some.  And I'm not very good at it.

The events of the past several days, some good and some bad, have kept me away from my computer.  So I've failed.  I haven't posted each day.  My 31-days-in-a-row of posting is a bust.

I broke the rules.

But God is still on the throne.

I'm a rule-follower par excellence.  Ten Commandments?  You bet.  Give me a dozen.  I believe in the power of law and order.  Certain rules really should never be broken.

Over the years, though, I've set a lot of rules for myself, and I've driven myself pretty relentlessly to follow those rules.  Worse than that, I've punished myself mercilessly every time I've broken them.

Life is not a scientific formula that will balance perfectly every time.  Some aspects of life can be organized and planned; others require actions and reactions that can't be predicted.  But the Spirit of the Lord lives in me, and I can trust the Spirit to guide me (Galatians 5:25).

So today I'm resolving to change the way I govern myself.  Of course I'll always have respect for God's laws.  But as for what I set for myself, my goal now is just to follow some guidelines that are good for my loved ones and for me.  And if I fail sometimes to follow those guidelines, I'll learn from the failure, make adjustments as needed, and carry on.

What about you?  Do you govern yourself harshly?  Do you need to join me in exchanging rules for guidelines?

If you need a good laugh, watch this clip from The Andy Griffith Show in which Barney Fife lays out the rules.

This post is the twentieth entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 19: saying thank you

Yesterday I felt compelled to write a little about the Martha Stewart interview that's been in the news this week.  After I wrote that post, I read some other posts along the same lines.  The very best one written by my friend Emily Freeman, and I want to share with you something that Emily posted.  Take a minute to watch this one.  You'll be blessed.



Mr. Rogers was my favorite TV star when I was a little girl.  I watched his show faithfully, loving everything about his neighborhood.   As I watch this video, I think I had pretty good judgment back then.

In his kind and gracious way, Mr. Rogers reminds me that so many people have contributed to my well-being over the years.  So today I'm caring for myself by making a point of thanking them for their love and thanking God for blessing me with their presence in my life.

I'll start here.  I thank you, my dear blogging community.  You make a difference in my life, in more ways than I can count.

I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.

Philippians 1:3

For whom are you thankful?

This post is the nineteenth entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 17:Celebrating with the Grace at Home party

Welcome, friends!  It's time for the Grace at Home party!

This month I'm writing every day about taking care of myself body and soul.  Today I'm caring for myself by celebrating all the ways we make our homes places of grace.

Here are a few of my favorites from last week's party:

Debby from My Favorite Things created a simple but delightful Fall vignette.  Debby's photos are always food for my soul!



Nici at Posed Perfection made a beautiful Autumn centerpiece for her table.  Read her post to learn her secret for getting the arrangement just right.



Sweet Debbie from Debbie-Dabble is celebrating a remodeled kitchen.  Debbie calls her style "country Victorian," and her goal was to make her room look like an old-fashioned kitchen.  I think she succeeded!


Penny from Penny's Vintage Home shared the recipe for this delicious-looking Lemon Zucchini Bread.  I think my husband would love this bread.  Penny's husband actually bakes the bread and Penny makes the icing!

Jessica from Designers Sweet Spot is doing a series on Mason jar gifts.  I think anyone would love to receive a jar of this beautiful Almond Hand Creme, don't you?

Those are just a few of my favorites.  Thank you to everyone who joined the party!  I'm so grateful for each person who links up each week. If you've been featured this week (or in a previous week), feel free to grab the "I was featured" button (the code is right over in my sidebar).  I'd be so proud if you displayed it!

 

Now for this week's party!  Grace at Home is a place for you to share anything related to making your home a place of grace. I invite you to link posts about

• DIY projects
• decorating
• recipes
• hospitality
• homemaking tips
• parenting
• marriage
• faith
• self-care
• soul care

Whatever you do to make your home a place of grace, I'd like to hear about it.  Here's what I ask of you.  Please include the permalink to your post, not your blog's home page.  Please let people know that you've linked up.  No more than three posts per person, please.  And visit at least one of the other party participants--that's what really makes it a party!

Caring for Myself Body and Soul 16:Walking with a friend

Exercise.  Exercise.  I know, I know.  You know, too, don't you?  We all know how much we need to exercise.  So we do it--not necessarily because we want to do it, but because it's good for us.

For me, there's one kind of exercise that's good for me in every way--good for my body and my soul.  And that's walking with a friend.

So today I made a date to walk with one of my best friends, Libby Acuff.  (Now for a little shameless name-dropping: Libby is the mom of New York Times bestselling author Jon Acuff.)  Isn't she the cutest thing?

Brené Brown speaks about the need to have the kind of friend "who would help you move a body."  Libby is that kind of friend for me.  Fortunately I've never needed that particular kind of help, but Libby has talked and prayed and loved me through some really tough times over the years.

Libby and I walked and talked today for an hour and a half.  Honestly, it seemed like 15 minutes.  When I exercise by myself, I have to find something to occupy my mind or else the time drags oh-so-slowly.  When I walk with a friend like Libby, the time whizzes by.

If you're in need of some encouragement, I highly recommend walking with a friend.  It'll raise your heart rate and your spirits at the same time!

Do you have a friend "who would help you move a body"?  When was the last time you walked with her (or him)?

This post is the sixteenth entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 15:Organizing my purse

I'm so proud of my Autumn handbag.  Just look:

It's a glorious pumpkin color with brown trim.  Nearly every day someone compliments me on it.

But that's because they can only see the outside of it.  Inside, it's a mess!

I've decided that enough is enough.  I spend a good bit of time trying to organize things for my family--papers, appointments, records of all kinds, calendars, etc.  I'll bet you do, too.  During this month of focusing on caring for myself, I've realized that I need to spend some time organizing my own stuff.

Luckily there are organizing experts to help me.  In fact, my friend Becky from Organizing Made Fun just published a guide to organizing your purse.   Here's what the inside of Becky's purse looks like:



On her blog, Becky shares her secrets to keeping her purse looking like this.  I'm going to take her up on her challenge to get my purse organized.

You know, the only person who will benefit directly from this exercise will be me, but that's okay.  What I'm realizing this month is that taking care of myself in big ways and small is worth the effort.  And there will be indirect benefit for everyone around me: getting my own spaces organized will contribute to my being happy and healthy, which will help me to care for everyone else!

How are you at keeping your personal spaces organized?  Do you need help in this area as well?  Or do you have any ideas to share?

This post is the fifteenth entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 14:Sending a package

There are very few things that make me happier than getting a package in the mail.

I can trace my love of packages to my childhood.  We lived in Tennessee, but my mother was from Kansas, and all her family lived there.  Every so often our mailman would deliver a package from my Kansas grandmother.  What joy erupted when the mailman approached with a box!

Those packages offered such delight for us.  They seemed like treasure chests.  When I stop now to think about their contents, though, I realize that they were pretty humble.  My grandmother was a school cook, not a woman of great means.  She would send tiny treats--perhaps a dish towel for my mother's kitchen, a box of note cards, maybe some scented soap.  She usually tucked in a little plaything for each child.  And she always included some candy.

But you know what was in every package?  In every single box?  Empty bread bags.  From Rainbo bread.  I can picture those bread bags so clearly!  Instead of using bubble wrap or some other kind of filler, my grandmother would save the plastic bags from the loaves of sandwich bread she served in the school cafeteria.  Those bread bags wrapped fragile items and provided padding for everything in those packages, and in our house my mother used them for a thousand and one things.  Seemingly worthless plastic bags, otherwise destined for the trash, became the filling for those magical packages--packages that would bring pleasure and encouragement and memories that would last much longer than the trinkets they held.

I decided to resurrect the fun of those packages.  Last week I collected a few trinkets for a friend who's living far from home and family.  Alas, I had no bread bags, so I used styrofoam peanuts for packaging.  As I placed each little item into the box and wrote a note of encouragement to my friend, I was filled with a rush of good memories.  Even the chore of taking the box to the post office was an errand of happy thoughts for me.

My hope is that receiving the package was a day-brightener for my friend.  I know for sure that sending it was good for my soul.  Turns out that sending a package is as much fun as receiving one!

Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens,

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,

Brown paper packages tied up with strings--

These are a few of my favorite things.

Caring for Myself Body and Soul 13:Sunday soul care

A reminder for today:

Caring for Myself Body and Soul 12:Resting

I am tired.  The last few weeks have been wonderful but busy, and I am worn out.

Sound familiar?

“The number one enemy of Christian spiritual formation today is exhaustion,” states Jim Smith in his important book The Good and Beautiful God.  This is a bold proclamation, but I believe it is right.

Surely the need for rest is not a new development, nor is the instruction from God to rest a new instruction.  God commanded His people: “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work.  But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work” (Exodus 20:9-10).  Hmmm.  A commandment to rest. 

Throughout most of human history, men and women have been aided in their need for rest by the fact that there was light by which to work only for a portion of each day.  As civilization progressed, humans found ways of producing light to see in the darkness, but those sources of light were usually expensive and often scarce.  Faced with the reality of no light by which to work, humans slept during the darkness.

That scenario has changed.  As humans have developed more reliable ways to generate light, they have simultaneously warded off the darkness for longer and longer hours.  What was once a reliable source of rhythm for the cycle of work and rest is now gone.  We can now have light available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Darkness is now hard to come by in some parts of the world.

Yet the way the human body functions has not changed much in the years since God commanded his people to observe a day of rest.  The amount of time generally set aside for sleep has shrunk, but the need for it has not.  In these days filled with artificial light and late-night opportunities for work and play, we must now be very purposeful in the pursuit of physical rest.  I think we often fail to consider that we must choose to rest or else we're likely to have rest forced upon us when we are exhausted to the point of physical, mental, or emotional distress.

A friend of mine discovered this truth the hard way over the past few years.  An intelligent, well-educated, talented woman, "Scooper" (whose blog, a la mode, is one of my favorites) is a busy wife and mother of three.  At one point she was active in her church and community and was homeschooling her children.  She was doing a wonderful job at many worthy tasks, but she wasn’t resting.  Scooper writes:  “I was unraveling in every way imaginable.  Chronic headaches and unshakeable exhaustion were constant companions, but they were nothing compared to the state of my weary soul, a soul that was dealing with far too much in its graceless, tapped-out state.” 

After a time of retreat that included a good deal of sleep, Marian realized an important truth.  “Our culture preaches the false gospel of productivity and Christians have swallowed it down too, living out a subconscious theology that God helps those who help themselves, make it to the top, and save the world while they’re at it.”

A false gospel, indeed, and the antidote to it is to choose to stop.  To rest.

When you stop to think about it, you realize that resting is an act of trust.  Trust that the world will keep on spinning, the sun will keep on shining.  Trust that God is good and loving and will provide for us.  Will our work pile up while we rest?  Perhaps.  But our ability to do our work will also accumulate.  Rest is not in vain.

Do you need some rest?

This post is the twelfth entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

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Caring for Myself Body and Soul 11:Taking care of my hands

I'm a firm believer in skin care.  Creamy skin was one of the things I inherited from my mother, and I treat my skin pretty well.

Except for my hands.

While I take good care of the skin on my face and décolletage, I tend to ignore my hands.  So while my face and décolletage don't necessarily reveal my age, my hands scream "She's 50 years old!"

I'm resolving to take better care of my hands, starting with getting the skin soft again.  Honestly, though, I don't want to spend a lot of money on my hands, so I've been looking for cost-effective ways to relieve the dry skin on my hands.  I've tried several different products, with mixed results.  But now I think I've hit the jackpot:

Coconut oil.  Have you tried this stuff?  It's amazingly emollient and smells beautiful.  And it's not expensive, not even this certified organic version.

My hands are rough enough that they need to be exfoliated as well as moisturized, so I've come up with a simple scrub for softening my hands. Here's how to make it.

• Gently heat 1/2 cup of coconut oil.  (It's semi-solid at room temperature, so heat it just a little so that it will be easy to stir.)
• Add a couple of tablespoons of a gentle gritty substance, such as sugar or salt.  (I used plain old table salt.)
• Stir well so that grit is incorporated throughout the coconut oil.  Store in a tightly sealed container.  (Hint: If you use salt, make sure your container is impervious to salt.  If you use sugar, make sure your container has a very tight seal so that the mixture won't attract ants.)

To use the scrub, simply dip out a bit and rub hands together for about a minute.  Don't be too rough--let the gritty substance do the exfoliating work.  Then wash hands with a gentle soap and dry thoroughly.  You'll be amazed at how soft your hands feel!

Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us;

Establish the work of our hands for us;

Yes, establish the work of our hands (Psalm 90:17).

Do you take good care of your hands?  Any tips?  Please share them!

This post is the eleventh entry in a 31-day series: Caring for Myself Body and Soul.  

Click here for a list of all the posts in this series.