(Stock Photo – Canva)

By Marrick Kowalski

Fall is upon us! Regular activities have resumed, and kids are back in school. The dishes seem to pile up faster, and the laundry has more stains than usual. It feels like the family calendar is packed so full that it might spontaneously combust if you attempt to write another thing on it. If this is what your life is like, you are not alone! With youth back in school, planning a wedding that is coming up faster than I can keep up with, and keeping up to date with family and friends, my day planner is chock-full! Meetings, youth groups, 40 classroom visits, engagement photos, prayer cloths to sew, website updates, and family supper. All things that are necessary and that need to be done. In an almost overwhelming sense, it feels like a never-ending stream. Days and weeks like these make monastic and cloistered lives look tempting! So, I asked myself, “If this way of life looks so nice (at least from the outside), how can I incorporate pieces of this way of life into mine?”

This is what I came up with:

-Take inventory of what’s important. What do I want to prioritize? How can I balance my work life and personal life better so that they exist as one instead of co-existing side-by-side?

-Busyness is not the same as productivity; busyness is an excuse to use when I don’t want to prioritize an activity. I now block out time for all those little annoying things I don’t want to do, and I set a timer and see how much I can get done in those 15 or 20 minutes.

-Set boundaries; even Jesus had boundaries in His ministry. I am allowed to say “no” or “not right now” to certain activities.

-Place my worth in Jesus. Society tells us that our worth and value come from what we can do and what we offer to others. The Church teaches that our worth comes from being adopted children of God. Our worth lies in WHO we are, not what we do. I am not a failure if I don’t complete the tasks I wanted to do that day.

-Schedule my free time/rest time/leisure time! Leisure is an integral part of life. My cup needs to be filled before it can overflow to others. If I am not fulfilling my basic needs, it becomes difficult to serve others in all areas of my life (at home, at work, and at school.) There is a certain freedom in having a schedule and sticking to it. On the surface, it may seem restricting, but it allows me to remove an aspect of decision-making and follow an already laid-out plan. As someone who works for the Church, Sunday is not always a day of rest for me. I intentionally pick another day of the week to be my Sabbath.

-Place everything in the context of prayer. Work is prayer. Cleaning is prayer. Planning is prayer. A quick morning prayer sets my day up for success, so no matter what happens, I’m filled with the peace of the Lord, and all throughout the day is offered to Him.

Getting caught up in the swirl of everyday life can be so easy. I have found that taking a minute, having a plan in place, setting times to accomplish tasks (especially menial ones), and placing my worth in the Lord have given me so much freedom to live a balanced, full, peaceful life. I still need to “put on my willow branches” (be flexible) every day, but incorporating these things has drastically reduced the amount of time I spend stressed and worrying about the things to come and the ability to live in the present moment with God.

Marrick currently works as the Youth Ministry Coordinator at Christ the King Parish in Regina. She spent two years serving with NET Ministries (one year in PEI, Canada and one year in Cork, Ireland), and misses being close to the ocean. When she’s not planning youth group, in the schools doing classroom visits, or running retreats, you can probably find her at a local coffee shop or at home working on her calligraphy technique.