I love Pinterest. I love blogs of like-minded people giving practical tips or recipes and presenting it beautifully. I can spend half an hour getting lost in someone's Instagram feed from North Korea or NYC foodies. It's fascinating.
I did an online search and instantly found helpful info: 58 of the best party ideas, 30 ways to organize, 15 "insanely delicious" holiday recipes, how to make better decisions, 102 living room decorating ideas. There's an endless supply of practical ideas of how to be our best, do our best, feel our best, and look our best.
Its good stuff. I could be better organized in more than 30 ways. Who wouldn't want to have a great party with insanely delicious food in a trendy living room all the while looking great and feeling awesome? Eh?? I'll take it.
There is a caveat to all of this great, instant information. If we are not careful, we can fall into a trap of chasing an ideal that never exists, an endless quest for inspiration and efficiency. There is a pervasive but unspoken myth that an"it" is out there if we just keep at it long enough. "Its" can be our children, career, self-image, political passions, whatever represents an ideal to us.
The difficulty is that although many of these goals are noble and worthy of our time, the satisfaction they give is temporal. We work toward the next goal, the next challenge, with its new responsibilities and possibilities. But strangely, when we meet our own demands and the challenge is over, we are not satisfied for very long and thus pursue a new goal once again.
It dawned on me one day (finally) that everything happening around me is the "It". It's in the day to day routine of kissing my children goodbye before they go to school, of being patient with someone who's irritated me, of sitting outside just to watch clouds blow over, of making sure the clothes get clean, of postponing things that need to be done to have family time, of telling someone that God set things up so we can come to him just as we are through the gift of his son. Its the essence of finding "everyday glories", the name of this blog.
God beckons us to do this - to find him in the mundane and unexpected. I love how Shauna Niequist puts it in her devotional book Savor, "Things will not always be as they are now - there will be new things, other things, good things. But I don't want to miss this, this right now, this sacred everyday. And I don't want to only see the surface. I want to see the depths - the work of God all around me, in conversation and prayer and silence and music."
That is exactly what I hope I do in 2016.
