After all last month, sharing some advice about ways you can make art in your life, I hope you are encouraged to try and squeeze some creative time in your life. We are back to the homeschooling grind here, which has its own blessings. We loved having our week off, but we love being in the routine too. We have one more 12 week term to go, then summer vacation! If you homeschool, let me know in the comments where you are in your school year!
As I’m sure you know, there is no finding the time, but you make the time for creativity. And we live very full lives these days. But there is also a way of life that makes this easier. It's a way of life that I call the Analog Life. In our hyperconnected world, it is often hard to find the time to do any of the real-life things we want to do. But we can choose differently. We can choose to disconnect and reconnect with the past and how to make things with our hands and speak eye to eye with the real people in our lives.
Over at the School of the Uncomformed, they have a long list of reader-generated ways that people today are choosing to do things the older way, the slower way. I highly commend you to read through it all. Here in our home, we choose to make sourdough, can some (but not all!) our food, sew quilts, and make presents and cards for family. In these ways, we buck the accepted technological standards of the day.
Somewhere deep inside us we know that we are meant to do things.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ~ Genesis 2:15
When Adam and Eve were in the garden God blessed them and gave them work to do with their hands. Have you ever stopped to consider the implications of that? He GAVE them work to bless them BEFORE they sinned and left the garden. That means that it was part of God’s original design in perfection for us to work. I remember the first time this slapped me upside the head and I realized how much of my own culture had shaped my perspective on work.
Things should be easier. Why do I have to work so hard? Do I have to be sore at the end of the day? These used to be my thoughts anytime I had a hard task ahead of me to tackle. Whiney and unwilling. But when I realized that good healthy work was a part of God’s design for us and by embracing good hard work we would be bringing ourselves more closely into what God had prepared for us in his perfect plan.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a farmer. Not really even a homesteader. I’m not a composite woman* and I don’t have a Pinterest-worthy life. But now I choose to see all good hard work as a way I can use my body to glorify the One who made me.
*One of my favorite podcasts to listen to is The Read-Aloud Revival #thereadaloudrevival (because, y'know, homeschooler!) Sarah MacKenzie talks about how we create a composite woman when we compare our lives with someone else's. Because we see what several other people do and we assume they are doing all the things we don't do or wish we could do, plus all we currently juggle. It's not a real person, just an idea of a person that doesn't exist.