The tension of intentionality

IS it holier to go with the flow?

The year I turned eighteen, I decided to pursue “missions” and go through a Discipleship Training School with the organization, YWAM, or Youth With a Mission. (I have very many [not positive!] thoughts about such “schools” and short-term mission trips, and I may elucidate on those at a later time, but that’s not the direction right now so I’ll just leave it at that.) Eight weeks of the five-month-long DTS was the overseas mission trip (or the “Outreach”, as it was called), and that was my first introduction to traveling outside the United States. All through my childhood, my family regularly traveled all over the western and mid-western States, but anything beyond that was a mystery to me.

My Outreach was to India, and it truly changed my life. I highly doubt it positively affected anyone’s salvation (see previous parenthetical statement), but living for two months in a world that couldn’t be more different than the rural Idaho community I grew up in changed how I viewed pretty much everything.

That trip also set the stage for the way I would live my life for the next five years: always on the move and never staying in any one place too long. Montana, Idaho, Wisconsin, Thailand, Florida, Missouri, New Zealand. More “missions”, working retail or in childcare or at libraries, going to Bible college. My “homes” were a bedroom in a friend or relative’s house, or a dorm room. Rarely did I have more with me than I could fit in a couple of suitcases.

And I thought that was the ideal, what I should be aiming for. My brief stint in the “missions” world had drilled into me that, as a good Christian, I shouldn’t be too attached to anything, be it stuff or routines. Though it was never communicated explicitly, it was implied repeatedly that the holiest person was the one that went with the flow, and was ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice. As I was told over and again: God wants to push you beyond your comfort zone (side note: where in Scripture in there any basis for that concept?!), so you better make sure nothing is keeping you in that less-than zone.

Fast forward roughly twenty years. I’m almost forty, with seven kids, teenagers down to toddler. In the recent years, it has come to light that I have clinical OCD and various sensory issues, and several of my children are also neurodivergent. We’ve been deliberate about finding routines and practices that help both my kids and I thrive when the world overwhelms our differently-wired brains. (Side note: for any mama, neurodivergent or otherwise, this tincture combo has been incredible for helping with the frazzled overwhelm feeling that can come on the daily as a mama. I can’t recommend it enough, and the affiliate coupon code “JQT10” gets you 10% off your order.) We try to cultivate a wide margin in our lives, and intentionally have regular times and spaces for quiet.

But then things happen like the family trip that we went on a couple weeks ago. For the past nine years, my parents have rented a big house in St. George, Utah, for a week, and my two sisters and I and our respective families will all drive there and spend as much as of the week together as we can. The current head count is twenty-one people, and right now, eight of those people are ages six and under. We love each other dearly, but it can be a lot.

This year was especially challenging for me as Aaron was working half days every day we were there, and he and I were dealing with significant relational tension due to some other stuff going on. Add to that the fact that car trips with kids push my sensory issues to the absolute max, and in the bustle of trying to do all the things with these extended family members we don’t see very often, I felt like there just wasn’t time for the intentional times of quiet that I try to daily cultivate here at home, and my mental health suffered because of that.

On the drive home (one that felt like a bad dream, turning a normally ten-hour drive into a trip that took 28 hours, thanks to repeated car trouble and a too-snowy mountain pass that precipitated turning around at 10:30pm to stay the night at a seedy hotel), I was trying to make sense of all my swirling thoughts regarding the tension between having an intentional life while also being flexible as needed. For years, I’ve felt that the larger part of me that thrived on rhythms and routines was somehow wrong or less holy. Wasn’t I supposed to always be wanting God to “push me out of my comfort zone”? (Again: Scriptural support, anyone?!) My personality plus my mental illness mean that I can really struggle when I lose certain aspects of my intentional life, and I felt like that meant that I was failing.

But now I’m wondering if that tendency is as bad as I previously thought… While we all need to be able to adapt to circumstances as they change (as the saying my mom has on her refrigerator reminds us, “Blessed are the flexible for they shall not be broken.”), I don’t think that being intentional in your life and thriving in that intentionality is a bad thing. My evening routine of lighting a candle and reading in the quiet truly feeds my soul, and for that I am thankful. Quiet and intentionality can and should serve to bring our attention back to God, and that’s always good.

I’ve mentioned often one of my absolute favorite books that I’ve read (and re-read) this past winter, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention by Sarah Clarkson. The following quote from there beautifully sums up what I want to cultivate in my life.

"What are the shapes of quiet? 
What are its cadences? 
How may I so frame the time I am given each day that quiet is claimed as a holy space, cupped so I may sip from its nourishment? 
Asking these questions has helped me to move away from an idea of quiet as something primarily about negation—subtracting people (a near impossibility with four small children in the house), noise, and activity from my life—to something that is claimed or created. To a positive thing I craft by shaping the hours I have been given, understanding them not as neutral space but rather the soil of my life out of which will grow whatever I choose to plant in the loamy earth of my given days."

This idea has completely shifted how I approach my days and the choices I make with my time. These “little islands” (to quote my mom) of quiet are something that I want to be able to cultivate, no matter the circumstances, and to be able to embrace them for the gift that they are.