Joy Let Loose

February 18, 2021

How to be Intentional With God: The Busy Woman’s Guide

A Guest post from Kaitlyn Fiedler

How can we be intentional with God in an age of busyness? Life is demanding. Especially as a wife or momma, right? Every day, we are pulled in a million different directions.

House needs tending, food needs cooking, babies need holding, and clothes need folding. There are groceries to buy, there are weeds to pick, and there is mail to sort. Maybe a friend needs a visit, or parents need caring for. All this and so much more take up our days as women. And this doesn’t even cover the added time spent working a job either inside or outside the home.

So, in all this, how can we, as busy women, be intentional with God to open our hearts and minds to the Father? How do we hear his voice among the noise? How do we prioritize time with him, when daily tasks close in on us from the time our eyes open in the mornings?

Three Ways to be Intentional with God

Three practical ways come to mind:

Don’t wait for everything to be ‘just so.’

If we wait for everything to be ‘just so’ before we commit to spending time with God, we may never get around to doing it. I used to think that time with God had to look the exact same every single day: a big comfy chair with a nice soft blanket, a coffee in hand, soft music playing, and no interruptions- haha! If I couldn’t find that time in my schedule every day, I just wouldn’t spend any time with God. This is such a lie that is so easy to believe as women!

We see all the Instagram pictures of women having their quiet time every day in the most beautifully decorated spaces with the prettiest mug in hand and zero disruptions.

But if we want to get real, who actually has that kind of quiet time? I don’t know about you, but for me, many days, it doesn’t happen until after my little one goes down for their morning nap. After we’ve spent about an hour playing and feeding, he finally falls asleep and I get to finally sit down, ready for another nap myself.

Instead, I pour some coffee and rub my eyes, forcing myself to stay awake while I sit with hair a mess in a room filled with baby toys. If I’m lucky to read a couple of chapters straight through with no disturbances, it typically takes about 15 minutes, but most of the time it ends up taking about an hour due to interruptions from my little one waking up or my husband (working from home) having a question or wanting to talk about something.

So, to sum it up, everything will NEVER be ‘just so,’ but we’ve got to be disciplined in getting that time and making it work in our day, even if it’s not picture-perfect.

God is always with us, so we can be always with him.

Never stop praying (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and meditate on God’s word day and night (Psalm 1:2).

These verses teach us to constantly be in communication with God all throughout our day. God is always available to be reached. We are never without him. He is with us and desiring to be our helper at all times.

Yes, there is a time for distancing ourselves (like Jesus did in Mark 1:35) in order to have uninterrupted quiet time talking with our Lord. But when we can’t do that, we are invited to talk to him and be with him at any point in our day, wherever we are.

Find God in every little thing.

The Lord never abandons us. He never leaves us to walk this life alone. He is everywhere, if we just look.

He can be found in the quiet of the night as we close our eyes and close out our thoughts, thanking him for every good thing He brought that day. God can be found in the early morning rise, as we ask him to guide us and show us his presence that day.

He can be found around the breakfast table with our family, as we thank him for his provision. God can be found in the car ride to school, as we love on our kiddos before sending them out for the day.

He can be found in the breeze on an afternoon walk… in the sunshine… in the rainfall. For He is the great Artist of creation. He can even be found in the messy and long afternoons as we work hard to take care of our home and our families.

Choose to be intentional with God

By the end of the day, we are weary, yet we have the opportunity to thank God for another day He’s given us. As we lay our heads down, we ask him for the strength to face another day and for his eyes (Matthew 13:16) to see him in every little thing.

Kaitlyn Fiedler lives near Greenville, SC with her husband and baby boy. She spends her days studying for her seminary classes and simply enjoying her days being a wife, a biological mom, and a new foster mom. She writes regularly about faith and womanhood on her blog: abeautifulbelonging.com. You can also find her on Instagram @kaitlyn_fiedler.


Thank you so much to Kaitlyn for joining us today at Joy Let Loose! I love your perspective and your encouragement to busy women, and the reminder to be intentional with God. There is such significance and beauty in cultivating our relationships with the Lord each day.

Elizabeth Joy

October 11, 2017

Finding Joy Resources from Joy Let Loose: New EBooks!

We all need some  finding joy resources to help with our joy journey. So, while I’ve been working in worship ministry and writing for this blog, I’ve also been creating some others to go alongside. I want to provide practical steps to help us reclaim joy by renewing our minds and strengthening our spiritual lives.

Finding Joy Resources

Today I launched my second finding joy ebook, Replace Lies With Truth. This ebook was birthed from a blog post I shared several months ago. I have expanded it to highlight 7 prominent lies people believe about finding joy in the Lord. It applies Scriptural truth to the lies to help us walk in the reality of joy-filled life. “Replace Lies With Truth” also provides you with a place to keep track of your own progress as you identify and eliminate lies by trusting in God’s Word. So I’d love for you to grab it today for free!

God longs to complete our joy. | Replace Lies With Truth Click To Tweet

 

Some of you have already downloaded my first ebook, Abiding Joy (30 Prayers from Joy Let Loose.) If you have, thank you! The idea for this ebook came when I realized one of my blog posts about prayer was gaining particular traction. Couple that with my experience as a worship leader, coaching many people to learn to pray publicly, and I realized how many believers feel inadequate in their prayer lives. So I designed these prayers to help readers learn to pray in a variety of ways.

I would love to hear your experiences with using these prayers in your daily life.  So share in the comments below!

May it be said of me that I am a person of constant praise. | Abiding Joy Click To Tweet

And before you go, earlier today I recorded myself talking about each of these ebooks. Check it out! 

Thanks for visiting today! As always, I’d love to hear about your joy journey in the comments!

Elizabeth Joy

 

January 25, 2017

3 Morning Prayers, and Why I Commit to Pray Them


3 Morning Prayers and Why I Commit to Pray Them

Sometimes I need to be reminded to pray. As I start the morning, and move into all the day holds, it is easy to forget I’m not in it alone, that I don’t have to do it all by myself. So I wrote some morning prayers to help.

 It’s also easy to underestimate the possibility of participating fully in life on this earth, and finding the joy within it all. Because prayer is a lifeline, a direct line to the Author of the universe, and the One who is intimately acquainted with our hearts. These encounters with God remind us Who God is, and who He’s forming each of us to be. And morning prayers help us to head into the day, remembering that there is always more happening than what we can see, and it is a trust-fall into the sure arms of a strong God.

Prayer is a trust fall into the sure arms of a strong God. Click To Tweet

It is important to learn to pray – it doesn’t exactly come naturally. That Jesus taught His disciples to pray is a good indicator that it might be a learned thing. His model of prayer in Matthew 6 is an awesome springboard to learn some important elements of connecting with God. Studying and praying the prayers of others (ancient or modern) and planning or writing out our own words can help us to learn to pray with depth and richness, rather than just stumbling over repetitive clichés. And the more we practice our prayers, infusing them with the truth of Scripture, the more easily we will pray meaningful, spontaneous prayers as life events occur. So we won’t feel lost for words, wondering what to say, but instead we will find joy in the communication.

I’ve written three morning prayers that I plan to use each day, as part of my  Morning Joy Challenge. And there are several reasons I want to incorporate these into my life as I begin each day:

1) They are reminders of the three Persons of the Trinity, each with His own role in their union, and in my life. This will help me not to only focus my attention on one part of the Godhead, and will help to increase my perspective of God. 

2) They will help to weave Scriptural themes into my prayers.

3) They will build my confidence in God’s active involvement in my day to day life because He has placed His Spirit within me.

So, on our journey toward joy, I invite you to join me by incorporating these morning prayers into your routine. I would recommend you catalogue your journey by grabbing a prayer journal and keeping track of your thoughts as you pray, as well as God’s answers to your prayers.

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January 17, 2017

Seize the Moment (Be a Hummingbird)

A few weeks ago I initiated  The Morning Joy Challenge. I hope many of you have chosen to seize the moment, and have begun to experience a fresh perspective with the rise of the sun. (Please feel free to leave comments below about your journey with that!)  Just what does the dawn of the day hold for each of us? We need to begin well, of course, but we also need to move on into the day well if we are going to truly be joy journeying.

Frantic Pace

I’ll just come right out with a confession: Mornings aside, I’ve lived too much of my life at a frantic pace, in body and in mind. (Have you ever watched a hamster run around his cage? Across the back, into the tunnel, out of the tunnel, on the wheel, in the food dish, over his brother, back on the wheel…).

I’ve been a lot like him. I’ve been a hamster.

And living life at a frantic pace has not been good for my soul. It has not been beneficial to my marriage, or my kids, or my friendships, or my vocation. And let’s not even talk about my housekeeping. (Incidentally, I’ve discovered a correlation between the state of my mind and the state of my house. Sometimes it’s actually the clutter around me that suddenly notifies me of my pace. It pays to be observant of these things, my friends.)

But I love to work and to be productive and efficient and good at what I do. So is it wrong for me to stack up on responsibilities and move deftly through them all the time? Well, no. And yes. It comes down in part to motivation. Does my pace of life honestly reflect a joyous engagement with the Lord and the imprint I can leave on this world? If so – awesome! I should keep it up. This world needs energetic and passionate people tirelessly bringing His Kingdom to bear in homes, in the marketplace, and in neighborhoods. I believe God has placed within me a desire to do good things with excellence, and it’s important to lean into God-given wiring.

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