Christmas 2015

Hi dear friends and happy Monday! I hope everyone had a wonderful and magical Christmas. We certainly did over here. We did a lot of traveling, ate a lot of good food, and spent a lot of good time with our family. We also received more gifts than we needed and were so excited to give our gifts to their recipients! We had a beautiful candlelight service at church on Christmas Eve. 

My parents gave Murphy a huge stuffed penguin and he carries it around everywhere, the cutest thing! I have this precious video of him taking the paper out of the bag, sticking his head in and pulling the penguin out. I've said it 100 times before and I'll say it again, I am convinced that Murphy is a human baby living in a dogs body. 

I love Christmas, but in all honesty I struggle with it a little too. We do a lot of running around between Christmas Eve and Christmas day and I often feel tired and rushed through everything and then the next thing you know, Christmas is over. I always struggle with that, Christmas being over. I always feel like it goes by in such a flash, then I worry myself with "was I excited enough over my gifts, did Josh and I spend enough time together at home, did we see our families long enough?" All very silly things, but thoughts that creep into my head as we take down the Christmas decorations throughout the house and it's all said and done. No matter how fast it goes each year, I'm so thankful for the days off of work and time spent with our families during Christmastime. I also got a kick out of Josh taking down the lights outside our house. There was a lot of grunting going on and a lot of giggling coming from my corner. 

Josh gave me my first set of Powersheets for Christmas and his parents gave me the book Make it Happen (both by Lara Casey) and I've started reading and working through my Powersheets. At first, I didn't really know what to do or where to start, even though there were clear directions haha! I honestly felt overwhelmed and like I couldn't search my heart enough to find the answers to the questions on the pages, so I decided to just start writing and see what came out. Then I decided to pray about it and let the Lord lay on my heart what I needed to write on the pages of my Powersheets. I'm excited and anxious to work through them and this process, and know that in the end I will be able to evaluate and dig deep into what matters for me. 

I am recognizing that there is a lot of clutter in my life that I'm ready to sift through and get rid of. Like following too many people on Instagram and having too many Facebook friends. I always thought it was kind of silly when I heard  people say that the noise from social media was too much, but I am coming to see how true that is. If I've never spoken to someone in real life or barely know them and we're facebook friends, why is that? Sometimes I scroll through my feed and I don't even know who is in the pictures because I barely know some of these people. The first thing I did this morning was go through and unfriend a lot of folks. Not because I don't like them, but because we don't know each other, don't live in the same place, barely passed each other in the halls of high school. I need simplicity and clarity, not a bunch of noise filling my feeds. So that's a little bit of what's on my heart as I'm wrapping up 2015 and looking ahead into 2016. I'm excited to work through my personal goals this week, and our family goals for the next year. I'll be here to share some of those throughout this week and next! 

There's a little Christmas recap and a little bit of whats on my heart today. I hope you had a great Christmas and are preparing your heart for the new year ahead!

1 comment:

  1. Cutting down my Facebook friends was one of the best things I've ever done on social media! I was friends with nearly every person in my high school graduating class because Facebook came out right after we graduated, and everyone just added everyone. But I finally started to think, "I was never friends with this person in real life. Why do I need to be friends with them on Facebook?" And of course there were people from other areas of my life who I had met once or something and had no reason to be FB friends with them. Getting rid of those people felt strangely liberating! There were also people I felt obligated to keep as friends (like family members and old family friends) who post too much, or post offensive things, or post lots of negativity, who I just went through and unfollowed. So most of my newsfeed is now things that I actually care to see, and it is so nice!


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