Joy Let Loose

February 18, 2021

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

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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

Posted in: Journey, Soul care
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October 26, 2018

Leading Worship With Joy (Instead of Giving Up in Defeat)

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How can you ensure you are leading worship with joy (instead of giving up with defeat?)

Ok now. Some of you read that question and are just about to click away. Even if you don’t have a musical bone in your body, this post is for you too. Please stay. 🙂

Some of you would know that my main ministry role is as a worship pastor. I have held numerous roles within this realm, from volunteer, to paid staff, to a professor of worship. All of these roles have stretched me and taught me much about Christian worship. None has really stretched me as much as my current role. And it’s not the role itself, or the church (which I love!). Rather, it was the reality that I was ultimately the one responsible to encourage our congregation to come  joyfully and fully to the Lord in worship, while in the middle of my own season of difficulty over the last eight months or so.

Rewind…

I’ve been through other troublesome seasons before as a worship leader. Like immediately after one of my husband’s best friends hit a moose with his car, dying instantly, and we had to lead worship at his funeral. Or that time five years ago when I had just spent several nights in the hospital learning to navigate a new Type 1 Diabetes reality with our 10-year-old daughter, only to wake up early the next morning (groggy) to an email announcing my fill-in worship leader for that morning’s chapel service had backed out. I remember being angry, yet not wanting to thrust anyone else into a last minute situation, and just crying in the shower. I was so mad at God for all my little girl was going through, exhausted from sleeping on an uncomfortable hospital cot, and overwhelmed by what was now only a 4-day reality for us that literally changed our lives.

But somehow, I was going to need to get up in front of our entire Bible College population and start leading  worship with joy in less than two hours. 

God met me right there in my frustration. He can always handle my anger at Him. And as I cried in the shower, He filled my mind with Truth. Scriptures came back to me. Songs welled up. And before I was even ready to drive to the chapel, I was excited to lead our people to worship. Because I realized again that He had never left us. I remembered His goodness. And I wanted to share that with other people so they could remember too. That morning stands out in my memory as one of the most powerful mornings of worship I have ever experienced in the hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of times I’ve led.

 

Leading Worship With Joy

(Instead of Giving Up in Defeat)

Who is a worship leader? What does a worship leader do? Most people would answer that question with descriptions including singing, playing an instrument, or leading from a platform into a microphone. And yes, in our church contexts, the vocational worship leader tends to do those things. But I would suggest there is more. There are more people called to lead worship than those of us who are skilled musically.

In fact, I would suggest that  all Christians are called to be worship leaders. Because to lead worship with joy is to point the way for other people to worship Jesus. You don’t have to be musical to do that, now, do you? In fact, here are some of the ways Christians can lead other people to worship God:

  • share your story of meeting Jesus
  • send an encouraging text that reminds someone of God’s love
  • tell someone about God’s provision when you were in need
  • add chairs to your table and invite people into your home
  • create graphics that highlight truths about God and share them through social media
  • change the conversation to one that is uplifting when it wants to drift to negativity
  • visit someone who is experiencing difficulty and help them, reminding them of God’s presence
  • invite someone to join you in a reading plan
  • openly replacing lies with truth as you discover them
  • write out 10 reasons you are grateful and post it as your Facebook status
  • listen carefully when people talk to you, and tell them where you see God moving in their story

This is only scratching the surface. But I hope you can see that none of these scenarios involve music, yet all point other people to God. This is  worship leading.

So What?

So what’s the big deal? Why am I even writing this post?

Well, because when life is tough, it’s really hard to do any of these things. It’s much easier to simply give up in defeat. It’s very tempting to a) share all the negatives, forgetting anything positive, or b) withdraw from people completely. But worship leading requires other people to be led. And it forces us to see through the negatives to realize the positives are still there, even if they seem to be in some other dimension.

And here’s the other reason. Every Christian is called to spur others on. All of us have the opportunity to be part of someone else’s spiritual formation story. How we choose to lead worship in our own lives will leave a legacy in someone else’s life. I want to leave a legacy of  joy. I want to impact the lives of others by pressing in with faith through the difficulties and the desolate seasons in my own. Faith shows the reality of what we are hoping for even when we can’t see them yet. And I lead worship with joy when I trust and pursue what I believe to be true, and I let others know about it.

Leading worship with joy is incredibly vulnerable. It’s risky. But great faith takes risks on believing God. Because He will never disappoint.

Great faith takes risks on believing God. Because He will never disappoint. Share on X

This is real life…

I have several Christian friends facing very difficult things: broken marriages, family members in drug rehab, financial distress, foster children in precarious circumstances, health uncertainties. Each one of them can be tempted to despair at every turn. But instead, each of them is called to  lead worship with joy.

 In hospitals and police stations, on the phone and online, in private moments and very public ones, they each have the choice to lead worship with joy. Not to ignore their circumstances, but to lead through them. They have the opportunity to help other people be formed spiritually by how they choose to point to Christ in the everyday-ness of their lives. And the reality is, as they choose to praise God at all times, their own joy will be restored. Their eyes will open to God moving in their own circumstances, they will be strengthened to persevere, and they will radiate faith.

Our worship is our fight song. It is our weapon to defeat the enemy. It is how we engage in lifting our own heads to face the realities of our day head-on. Leading worship with joy is how we win against defeat.

So what about you?

How is God calling you to lead worship with  joy? What tangible steps can you take today to point the way to Christ? What will it require of you? And how do you think you will grow through it?

I love it when people visit  Joy Let Loose to read and then engage with me in the comments. Would you be willing to share a story of how you lead worship with joy in your life? And would you also be willing to share this post with people in your circles who could also learn to lead worship with joy? Let’s let joy loose together!

Elizabeth Joy

Posted in: Journey, Worship
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April 2, 2018

REVIEW Unforced Rhythms: Why Daily Devotions Aren’t for All of Us

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Today I’m excited to review  Unforced Rhythms: Why Daily Devotions Aren’t for All of Us by Gwen Jackson. In a nutshell, she nailed it. 

Read this book.

 

But perhaps you’d like to hear a little more about why I would recommend it so highly.

 I have spent much of my life battling the feeling that I don’t quite fit in. In each and every group I have been part, I have seen incongruence between myself and everybody else. From my earliest memories, I had a foreboding sense that I was different. Oh, the contexts changed, yes, and with them, my awareness of what was different about me.

Well, Gwen Jackson wrote very clearly of one of these contexts where I had felt different for a long time: how, as a Christian, to engage with God. She spells it out clearly: there is no one cut-and-dried pattern of nurturing relationship with God.

Quiet time

Take me back 19 years to the point in my life where I surrendered myself to the Lord. All of a sudden, I was a new believer. And I had many well-meaning people around me urging me that the life of all believers includes “quiet time” with the Lord. Preferably in the dark hours of the morning. Always with a Bible and heartfelt prayer, and eternal eagerness to grow. Ideally with a journal at hand to capture all the amazingly powerful things to be discovered each and every time.

It didn’t take too long to discover how forced this felt for me.

Fast forward several years, and I finally seemed to find a rhythm. I found a season and a stride where I discovered closeness with the Lord. It wasn’t structured necessarily, no neat verses and choruses, but it was rich. Because it wasn’t always the same.  Sometimes it was out under the open sky; other times in the quiet of a sleeping house. Sometimes it was in the tune I was making on my keys, and other times in the chaotic noise and laughter of a crowd around my table.

And sometimes it did involve a quiet morning moment, the bible, a journal and prayer. And it was all good. Even if I didn’t meet the Lord every morning at the same time, same place, He and I were okay with that – I was still meeting Him in a way that matched my internal rhythms.

A Provocative Tagline

I sat with Gwen at a retreat in the mountains of Haiti last May when she was wrestling with the tagline for her new book. Some had suggested that her idea might seem a little too provocative, or controversial. But I’m glad she stuck with it. Because “Why Daily Devotions Aren’t for All of Us,” is the crux of this book. Even before I read it, I knew I’d want to review Unforced Rhythms when it was released.

I recently caught up with this author again and asked her a few questions.

From the Author
  • Elizabeth: Who should read this book?
  • Gwen : Anybody who is struck by the subtitle, “Why Daily Devotions Aren’t for All of Us”, will want to read Unforced Rhythms. It’s a liberating read, especially for those who have struggled with daily devotions like I did. But, those who find daily devotions meaningful will also find the book interesting. They will realize not everybody fits into the same spiritual formation box as those who love a daily routine. Just like personality differences, people beat to a different life rhythm. The book appeals to young adults and seniors alike.
  • Elizabeth: Why should believers read Unforced Rhythms and how might the book impact their journey of joy?
  • Gwen: Unforced Rhythms gives permission to believers to connect with God in the freedom of their own natural Life Rhythm. For too long, believers have been confined to morning and/or evening devotions, believing that having daily devotions was a measurement of Christian maturity. Certainly, spending time with God, in the Word, and in prayer, are important elements to spiritual growth and life change, but the daily part can feel legalistic, defeating, and tedious. Many non-daily people feel like they’re going through the motions or checking off a duty on their spiritual to-do list. Readers will find themselves identifying with one of the three Life Rhythms described in the book. Once they discover their unique Life Rhythm, they will be free to connect with God without the guilt and condemnation that often plagues believers.
Recommended!
I’m so thankful that Gwen was brave enough to write from her own wrestling, and that I was able to review Unforced Rhythms. She has helped me to find confidence in my own Life Rhythm as a seasonal person. This not only frees me from discouragement that my relationship with the Lord doesn’t necessarily look the same as someone else’s, it also inspires me to experience the Lord in new ways.
It is always so helpful to be able to hear of someone else’s similar journey. I happily recommend this book to you whether you’ve known Jesus for a long time, or you’ve just met. I recommend it whether you are eighteen or eighty. Because I believe you will find it a compelling, unique, and liberating voice in your spiritual formation.
Review Unforced Rhythms

“God meant time with him to be a joy-filled journey, not a list of rules to follow. Find freedom, peace, and joy in
the “unforced rhythms of his grace.”  – Gwen Jackson
Previous Book Review: The Joy Model, by Jeff Spadafora
Elizabeth Joy
Posted in: Soul care
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