Tag: worship

My routine on a given “writing day” has cemented itself over the course of the last few months. I’ll share it with you (since you asked, ha!)

I drag myself out of bed at the crack of 7am, run on the treadmill, prep the kettle to boil water for coffee, take a quick shower, pour the boiling water into the French press, cultivate hygiene, press the coffee and pour it into my favorite mug, fill up my water bottle, kiss Louisa and Linnea (who are always up by then), and retire to my desk in the upstairs room.

(notice how coffee-centric this is…)

From there it depends on the writing task at hand, but I’ll usually do some reading out of my Illuminated Bible (check this thing out, btw) and some journaling to get the writing juices flowing, before diving into whatever project is at hand.

I share all of this 1) because I like to overshare things anyway, but also 2) because I’ve been learning that routine is my friend. And it’s not just because it rhymes with and therefore reminds me of poutine, although that is a definite plus. Mm. Gravy.

Rather, I’ve begun (very slowly) to find comfort in daily routines. By “very slowly” I may or may not mean “glacial.”

freudian on a sunday morning

Last Sunday morning, as we were preparing for church, I expressed to Linnea that I felt like I’d wasted my Saturday, as though I hadn’t gotten anything done. She was flummoxed by this, and began listing off all of the things we did – searching for worms, visiting the farmer’s market, reading stories to the kids, cooking mac and cheese, washing dishes, reading Neil Gaiman’s “Fragile Things,” etc. etc. I realized to my chagrin that I had overlooked or forgotten nearly all of those things and their individual values. The normal things we do on a Saturday did not “rate” on my scale of value, and in my dismissal of them I also dismissed the special things we did.

Now, practically, I would always say that these things are important. But the fact that in casual conversation the truth of what I believe just slipped out gave me pause. My default is to say they aren’t. Why is that?

I’m an “in-motion” kind of person, the type to ask these kinds of questions at the end of the day:

“what have I accomplished?”
“how much closer am I to my goals?”
“what do I need to do tomorrow to get closer to those goals?”
“should I add new goals to achieve in the meantime?”

The space in this mental construct for repetition is very narrow, like paper-thin.

Taking on writing regularly after years as a musician has slowly opened my eyes to the fact that I sorely under-appreciate routine as a form of worship. When I practiced every day, it was always in regards to goals – not as a way to grow (apologies to all my wonderful teachers). I’ve come to realize – that goal-oriented utilitarian mindset may be why my love for playing the piano has waned. Another thought process for another time, but suffice to say, because I made my practice of art about the end-goal, I lost my love for the process.

The process is cherished in the routine.

school, regimen, and percy the wandering duck

Recently, Nadia started school.

One primary goal of the curriculum we use is to make learning exciting and interesting, and one of the ways this happens is through measured, paced learning. Nadia doesn’t spend more than 20 minutes on something, and most of her subjects are between 5-10 minutes. The reason for this is not to be slavish – when the calendar becomes king, the routine dies – but rather to keep things fresh and to work within the natural rhythms and attention spans of a young child.

Now that school has started, I see the three older kids troop outside every morning around 9:30am, ducks in a row behind Mama Duck, to do their exercises. They do some songs with motions, a regimen called the Swedish drill, and running around the house.

My favorite part of this routine is Percy, because he is always three or four steps behind everyone and he can’t help but take the scenic route. Whenever Mama Duck calls them to “Attention!” Nadia is very studied and accurate and Malakai is watching keenly and trying his darndest. But Percy will be off in another part of the yard (and another world, it seems) just jumping up and down and shouting “TENSHUN! TENSHUN! TENSHUN!”

I have great affinity for Percy in these moments.

“Unvarying, unimaginative, rote”

By distraction or intention, I’m all about something other than the routine – the next thing I need to get done or “hey wow that’s fascinating, I’m going to spend an hour researching tube worms.”

We all would assent to the notion that routine is important – discipline, habits, etc. But in our everyday lives, how often do we cherish those repeated tasks?

As a culture we’re driven to distraction, driven to “new things,” driven to experiences that we can show to our online friends on our feeds to prove that our life has meaning. Ultimately, though, this continuous drive to achieve and entertain leaves us saying things like: “I wasted my Saturday. I feel like I didn’t get anything done.”

Since language tends to mirror culture, “routine” has developed definitions beyond “a customary or regular course or procedure” to include “regular, unvarying, habitual, unimaginative, or rote procedure.”

This is a serious problem. Think about how this affects our worship.

worship through routine

Our worship is based on repetition – continually reading the Bible, continually singing songs to each other, repeating liturgies, meeting together, remembering by repetition of sacraments.

We meet God in routines. We hear from God in routines. We talk to God in routines. We are made new through routines.

My determination is to spend time every Tuesday on this blog focusing on these, if you will, “fragile things” – the moments that I tend to bypass – in such a way that I see and bring glory to the God who set seasons in motion. If the process of growth is found in routine, and life is in the journey more than the destination, I need to be routinely applying myself to that glory.

How do I do that? By writing, I explore.

How do you do that?