Hallelujah! He is risen!
As most of y’all are aware, we have just gotten out of a season of Lent. We use these 40 days as a time of observance and preparation for Easter. (But if I’m being real, I don’t think I can ever feel fully prepared for the death and resurrection of our Savior.) I know most people give up something for Lent, but this year I decided to take on something instead. I decided to focus on 2 different things: loving people and finding joy in my everyday life. I wanted to fill y’all in on what I learned over the past 40 days.
LOVE
Loving people is something that has been in the forefront of my mind the past few months. God loves us for who we are and where we are, not for who we will be one day once we figure everything out. He doesn’t care about what we have done in the past, because he loves us for just being us. This is something I have been trying to model. Loving people where they are, no matter what that may look like. I got the opportunity to hear Bob Goff speak this February, and of course he spoke about what it looks like to love people. One of my favorite things he said was something along the lines of “You aren’t going to agree with how everyone lives their life, but you can still love everyone. In those moments the best thing you can do is say, ‘I may not understand, but I still love you.’”
I’ve had this idea of loving people in my mind for a while, but I wanted to make it a priority this Lent. I decided to love people in small ways: find one thing I could do every day to love someone, and do that. I got ideas from The 5 Love Languages (it’s a book that I never actually read, but have used several times in my life). The 5 different ways people tend to give and receive love are through quality time, physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, and gifts. Basically, I made a big list and crossed one off every day. After doing this for 40 days I was able to learn which ways of loving people came more natural to me than others. Physical touch and acts of service were the easiest for me, while gifts and words of affirmation were the more challenging ones for me. I really enjoyed doing this for Lent because it showed me how easy it is to show simple love once I took a minute to stop thinking about myself. Showing someone love doesn’t always have to be an extravagant or grand gesture, but it can just be taking a moment out of your day to let someone know you are thinking about them.
JOY
It’s crazy to think that I am just about six months away from leaving the country for a year. I have been so caught up with excitement for what next year will hold, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I am trying to live each day fully instead of just look forward to what I will be doing in October. To help with this I decided to find joy in the everyday things. I would think about one thing happening each day, whether exciting or just part of my routine, and think about how it brings joy to my life. Then, I recorded a second or two of that activity every day during Lent. It helped me realize that every day matters and has equal opportunity as the next. I started to constantly think about how I can make my day more joyful, and then do those specific things. It’s easy for us to get caught up with busy schedules and to-do lists, but forget about how lucky we are to live the life we do. So here’s the video I put together for Lent. I hope you enJOY!
Live Joyfully from Audrey Keith on Vimeo.
