Break Out of Overwhelm and Make the Most of your Summer with a Rule of Life

How Catholic moms can live a well-ordered life.

How do you want to design your days?  Our lives aren't made up of a series of significant core memories.  They're actually the sum of our ordinary days.  Let's design them on purpose.

Making the Most of Summer with Intentionality

Hello friends, I hope everyone's doing great. It's the beginning of summer and most of us are settling into a new rhythm. And some of us are loving it. But some of us are feeling overwhelmed. Because it's a transition. There are new schedules, the library changed their hours. If you're like my family, it feels like every weekend has something on the schedule. Also, it's staying light longer, which totally messes with bedtimes and everything is different. So if you're feeling a little bit crazy, because of all of this going on, it's okay. You're not alone. You're not weird, and it's very, very normal.

Embracing the Transition

But I'm guessing you don't want it to stay weird, right? Because it's so easy to blink and miss the summer. And when we get in this weird beginning of summer funk, where we're trying to figure out what we're going to actually do with it, make our plans and settle in, it can feel like there's just so much that we have to decide on so many things we have to do. But I just want to point out that, that right there, this idea of we have to make the most of summer is a big part of our overwhelm. Because there's so much pressure, and so many possible ways to make the most of summer, we want to do it all somehow we don't want to miss this opportunity to do something really special with our time, I've totally been there guys, every year, I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that a lot of this pressure is actually in my head, all those big plans that we choose to do or not do are not going to make or break the summer.

Finding Intentionality Amidst Possibilities

But at the same time, we do want to be intentional. And that's a very good thing that can still feel overwhelming, though, right? There's so many possibilities to sort through and choose, the summer just stretches out ahead of us so empty with so many things we could put into it. How do we even begin knowing what to do? So that's overwhelming, because overwhelm at its root comes from unmade decisions. And a lot of our overwhelm right now is coming from the fact that there are so many possibilities. And we want to make the most of our summer. But we don't know how to do that we have all these ideas of what it could look like what we would be doing. There's zoo trips, there's hiking and travel and crafts and summer camp and our brain, it's like our brain is turning into an overflowing Pinterest board. So we feel we feel overwhelmed by the possibilities.

Embracing the Unmade Decisions of Transition

But the other part of it is that this is also just a transition. And when we hit a transition point, there are often a lot of unmade decisions that come with that, even for the most organized among us and my friends, I am not naturally organized, we do our best to plan ahead. But it's a bit like a road trip, we can have our Google Maps and a general idea of how we're getting there. And some of the milestones along the way. But it's just not going to account for all the ins and outs of the actual trip right. At the beginning of summer. There's so much like that, like when are we going to have snack time now? What do we do about the fact that you know, suddenly, there's thunderstorms, and that ruins our plans. So summers like that, too. But sometimes we go into it with even less of a sense of direction than when we're taking a road trip, we have a vague idea of when the family vacation is going to happen. We know when the kids have camp and all those other appointments, those things that are scheduled, we know when those are happening. But that doesn't mean we actually have a game plan for how we're going to use our ordinary days. And it feels like we get stuck in reaction mode with that it's really easy to fall into a routine that's unintentional, instead of intentional, but if you think about it, our ordinary days are in many ways more important than the big events in our life. The ordinary days are where our habits are formed. And our habits are what shapes our character. So we don't want to let those habits be shaped unintentionally.

Setting Summer Goals with Intentionality

So there are two ways to shape your goals for the summer. The first is what most of us start with what we want to do the core memories, you know, quote unquote, core memories we want to create, and the big events in our life. And those are really, really important, just like weddings, for example. But what's more important than the wedding, in a marriage. It's what comes after, right, the way we live our life day by day. And in a sense, also what came before, who we had become the kind of person we were going into our marriage. And amazing wedding doesn't mean anything about whether the marriage is going to be a good one. It might mean there are amazing memories and pictures and it's a really fun and wonderful time. But what's going to affect the marriage is going to be the way the people in that marriage live their lives, their character, their habits, their capacity for love and sacrifice. And it's the same thing with all the big plans we have for our summer. Those are wonderful Give me amazing experiences, but they aren't the most important part of summer.

A Call to Intentional Growth

See, I want to challenge you to instead start thinking about when you're making your plans for the summer, don't just think about the things you want to do. Those are like the weddings, they do matter. They are important. They're wonderful, they're special. But also, start setting goals for the kind of person you want to be. It's so important to take a hard look at who you want to become, and who you want your children to become and ask, what daily habits and routines are going to help us to get there. Because the way we do things matter so much, you know, the Bible says, if I give all I possess to the poor, and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. We can accomplish fantastic things. But if we do them for the wrong reason, or go about them the wrong way, they are pointless. And so it's our ordinary days, our ordinary moments that matter the most. And you see this summer stretching before you, and you're wondering how to make the most of it? Well, how will you use this time to grow? And I think most of us are hoping and praying to one day become saints to learn to completely love the Lord and one another, which takes quite the transformative process. So what is the summer look like through that lens? What kind of a prayer life do you want to cultivate? How do you want to grow in your relationship with the Lord and with your family? What virtues and habits do you want to form? What are the roles you play in your life? And what kind of impact do you want to have in each of those.

Creating a Rule of Life for Summer

And one of the things I teach in my course, which if you haven't checked it out yet, go to the link in the show notes and check that out. But one of the things I teach in my course is how to break this down, we start by looking at the different roles we have in our life and the impact we want to have through those. And I take you through something called a logic model to figure out how this actually plays out, and how to choose our habits and actions with care to build something called a Rule of Life. Now, a Rule of Life is an ancient Catholic tool for deciding how we spend our time and giving our time to the Lord. And there are so many different ways that people have built a Rule of Life over the past 1500 years or so. It's a tool that's been used by saints and holy men and women to make the most of their time to shape their ordinary days with purpose. Because our life is made up of our days. And our days are made up of mostly ordinary moments.

Overcoming Overwhelm through Intentional Decisions

Now I mentioned at the start of this that overwhelm comes from unmade decisions. The beauty of a Rule of Life is that it gives you a framework for making those decisions for discerning what is truly important and making sure those things happen. And I can't even begin to tell you how much peace this brings to your life, because you can tackle those decisions with conviction. And when you have conviction, it's easy to feel good about when you say yes or no to things because you know, you're choosing what matters. So take some time, this week. Here we are at the beginning of the summer, you can make the most of the summer. But think about your ordinary days and take some time this week to ponder these things. And always recommend that when you're trying to make plans that you go and sit before our Lord and adoration while you do this. First spend some time just listening to him and being with him and letting his peace settle into your heart. Because we need that peace to make good decisions. We never make good decisions from a place of frenzy. And after that, ask our Lord to guide you to align your heart to his as you make your plans, then you can commit those plans to him.

Trusting in the Lord's Guidance

My friends, I want to read to you from Psalm 127. It says, "Unless the Lord built the house, they labor in vain who build unless the Lord guards the city. In vain does the guard keep watch. It is vain for you to rise early and put off your rest at night to eat bread earned by hard toil. All this God gives to His Beloved in sleep." And so what does this mean? It means a couple of things first, without God's help, without our plans being aligned to His, none of this is really going to matter. It's all work we're doing in vain. And the other thing that this means is that we can work as hard as we want. But we need to remember that we are completely dependent on God as well. It's not all on our shoulders.

Balancing Prayer, Presence, and Productivity

You know, we have this idea that everything we do all of these plans we make, that everything depends on us. And that in a sense, defines our worth, but that's just not how it works. Do we have to give our plans to the Lord. And we have to trust that, if this is His will for our life, that He is going to help us that setting up some sort of perfect summer isn't all on our shoulders, what we can do is we can make our plans with the Lord's help, we can commit them to Him and do our best. And then what do we do? We just trust, we trust that He's going to multiply our efforts that He's going to take all of those things and make them meaningful. And that when our plans succeed, or fail, that He has a purpose in that and runs if you want to dive in deeper into all of this, head on over to my website, it's true presence dot life and sign up for the true presence course.

Transforming Your Life with the True Presence Course

Guys, this course is life-changing. The moms who have gone through it already have told me over and over again how much it transformed their life. You'll learn to balance prayer, presence, and productivity and build your life on purpose. We start with the big picture thinking and we work our way down to the little stuff like your meal planning. And truly, if you got nothing else out of this course, just having a system for making sure that you have healthy homemade dinners on the table every day is going to do so much for your mood, your health, and your budget. But the course covers so much more than that. So come on in and let's build your ordinary days together. I'm offering a launch discount right now through the end of June. So grab it quick. I can't wait to see you in there.

Conclusion

Remember, this summer is an opportunity to grow and to shape your ordinary days with intentionality. Embrace the transition, make intentional decisions, and trust in the Lord's guidance as you create a Rule of Life for the summer. With prayer, presence, and productivity in harmony, you can transform your life and make the most of this precious time. Head to my website and sign up for the True Presence Course to dive deeper into this life-changing journey. Let's build a purposeful and fulfilling summer together.