To-Do List Blues

My life was on overload like the clutter of my email inbox

I can make anything about a checklist. A goal to accomplish. A race to be won.

Currently, I am trying to get better about drinking water: the way I go about dehydrating myself throughout the day to push for one more thing has complicated my health. Naturally, I put another pale yellow post-it by the fridge this time entitled “Water.” Each morning, I add today’s date, and I make a small black check every time I refill my 12-ounce mason jar for drinking. I end each day making it about halfway to my 64-ounce goal. It’s a physical representation of something deeper going on inside me.

In “The Broken Way” calendar with daily quotations from one of my favorite authors, Ann Voskamp writes to my kind of people. She says, “Activity for God—is not the same as intimacy with God or identity in God. And it is your intimacy with Christ that gives you your identity.”

She is touching on the way my type-A, doer, autopilot (any of those characteristics will work) mode translates into every aspect of my life. It’s not just in my dealings with myself, but it carries over to my most important relationships: with my husband, my kids and even my God.

It was a couple weeks ago that my husband gently explained to me that I was taking the fun out of our weekly Friday afternoon dates together. Well, that’s a drag. I had managed to turn them into another mental checklist. How many new restaurants could we visit this year? The note in my phone of new food and drink establishments I wanted to check out kept growing. I thought our Friday dates would be a good opportunity to start tackling that list. But soon, tensions began to rise every Friday afternoon: Where were we going that day? Where we would park on our limited schedule? Is that place even open yet?  As the complications started piling up, Justin reminded me that we began adding these weekly dates into our busy calendar just so we could spend more time together.

It’s not just in my dealings with myself: it carried over to my most important relationships as well.

“I just want to sit and get a drink and talk to you,” he lovingly reminded me. Oh, how I had made it about all the other things. The ways to get ahead. To feel accomplished.

I joined a book club recently and we’re in the middle of reading “Present Over Perfect” by Shauna Niequist. The entire book is about her transformation from an overachiever who strived for perfection at the cost of all else, to a beloved daughter who, with the help of Jesus and some painful awakenings, is learning to choose present. Page after page, the more Shauna vulnerably pours out her heart and shares her struggles, the more I decide she is my soul sister. (Don’t we all?!)

The chaos of my brain often feels a lot like the clutter of my email inbox. There are so many things in life calling for my attention, requesting my response, asking me to do something with it. I’ve got to decide what is important and what is not. In my mind, I need to mark it “read” and put a proper label on it. File it away or get rid of it. But when I scan the scene, it all seems like a blur of confusion. God, what are you calling me to?

I know there is a richer way to life, but sometimes I cling to my OCD’s like a safety net. I manipulate the numbers, control the atmosphere, prioritize and organize and analyze. I choose to enter into the knitty-gritty because the bigger picture is wonderful and terrifying all at once and so rather than behold it, I lose sight of it.

My life ought not be summed up in check-listing my water intake,

but about coming back to my source of Living Water.

Likewise, it isn’t about managing the influx of my email inbox,

but about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit,

It’s not about the constant revolving doors of information,

but about transformation.

And little by little, God nudges me further into that transformation. With the kind truth-words of my husband. With the realization that I am weary and that sitting in a hammock talking in the backyard like we did last Friday afternoon was as good as any open-air bar with an East-Coast vibe that I could have graced with my presence.

I need to live my actual life.

It took the hand-holding of some close friends, but I recently deleted many years’ worth of unread messages, my email count decreasing by more than you could possibly comprehend. (To understand how it got so high, just have three babies and you’ll understand). It was a small step, but it signified a change toward something new. A charge. To take my life back. Away from chaos. Toward connection. And relationship. And real living.

No more trying to tackle 35,000 messages with no end in sight. Because just like my inbox that was too cluttered to weed through, we can add so much busy to our lives that we are left wondering:

-What message (in my life) has been neglected?

-What conversation (from my relationships) has been starred for later?

-What activity has been deleted? Archived, On overdrive (eh hem…those pesky daily email senders!)?

“The bigger picture is wonderful and terrifying all at once and so rather than behold it, I lose sight of it.”

They may be pesky, but right now those emails are serving as a pretty great metaphor for the questions I most need to ask myself. What about you? What has been the culprit of your real-life overload, facilitating a “for God” rather than a “with God” way of life?

As in the words of my soul sister (who just doesn’t know it yet):

“I’m learning to silence the noise, around me and within me, and let myself be seen and loved, not for what I produce, but for the fact that I have been created by the hands of a holy God, like every other thing on this earth, equally loved, equally seen.”  -Shauna Niequist

*Are you a mama who resonated with this post? Read the version I created just for mamas at I’m Crabby.

*Please leave a comment for all our readers, here or there, letting us know how you relate! 

POSTED BY

Jenna

Jenna Kruse is a teacher but not in a classroom. She loves to think outside the box and inside the Word and is daily in need of an attitude adjustment. She is a wife to Justin, a mother to three school-aged children, and a mentor to teenagers and young adults. You can learn more about the heart behind her blog HERE.

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