Archives for February 2013

The Pomodoro Technique, Decluttering, and Progress on New Year’s Goals, Week #5

By Anita Mathias

Looking across the Avon from the RSC, Stratfrord.

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford Upon Avon

Swans on the Avon

Amaryllis in bloom

I’ve experimented with the Pomodoro technique, and think it, more or less. suits me. It’s a way of keeping focused and averting distraction by working in an absolutely focused way for 25 minutes, and then taking a 5 minute break (to tidy, do weights, stretch or do yoga etc.) After 4 pomodoros, you take a twenty minute break.

It works well for me, because I got to garden during my 20 minute breaks for the first time this year, and also because the rooms I work in became incrementally tidier because I tidy up during my 5 minute break. Also, I get perspective on what I am writing, and feel fitter and more oxygenated. And one’s metabolism improves.

I hope to build in weights and yoga during my 5 minute breaks.

A major negative is that it introduces a distraction every 5 minutes, but one hopes an oxygenated, stretched body will be able to concentrate for longer.

* * *

I do a weekly blog-post on how I am doing with my New Year’s Goals, largely to keep myself accountable.

The nature of the beast, is that there will be spectacular weeks and ho-hum, failure-ish weeks. This was the latter.

Accountability on a blog is a powerful thing, what blogger Tim Challies calls Accountability Through Visibility. And for accountability to inspire you, and, well, keep you accountable, you have to be honest about your failures—and successes.

Bad weeks are par for the course. Here’s an early Christian story

A monk looking for some guidance and encouragement goes to Abba Sisoius and asks:
“What am I to do since I have fallen?”
The Abba replies: “Get up.”
“I did get up, but I fell again.”
“Get up again.”
“I did, but I must admit that I fell once again. So what should I do?”
“Do not fall down without getting back up.”

Anyway, here goes.

1 First Things First

Roy and I had got out of the habit of date nights or focused talk, so we had a very focused talk last evening on contentious topics. So contentious that we often had to follow the rule each person gets 2 minutes on a timer with no interruptions!! But we worked out an excellent, viable schedule for Roy, and cleared the air!

And had a couple of gorgeous family dates—watching Murray Watts ‎“Mr. Darwin’s Tree,” acted by Andrew Harrison–a sort of memoir of Darwin, in the form of a monologue. Verbally rich, poetic, bursting with energy, brilliantly acted. Loved it!

And a day at Stratford-on-Avon watching The Winter’s Tale, that bitter-sweet story of jealousy, madness and restoration. Loved the walk by the river Avon afterwards, looking at the crimson skies.

And spent a few hours over lunch with Reverend Lesley and Alan at their spacious Vicarage.

So not stacks of writing done.

2 Writing

Finished a little book I am planning to self-publish after an additional four revisions. And blogged.

“I still don’t get why people are so surprised that the turtle beat the rabbit over the long run. Consistent effort, no matter how small, sparks magic, fills sails, butters bread, turns tides, instills faith, summons friends, improves health, burns calories, creates abundance, yields clarity, builds courage, spins planets, and rewrites destinies.”

	Time/week
	Dec. avg.	Goal: Jan 28	Achieved	Goal: Feb 4	Goal – year end
Writing	7h 10 min	10 hours	7 hrs 40 m	9 hrs	35h
Social media	11h 17 min	3 hrs30 min	5 hours 30	3 hours 30	3h 30min
News, Blogs, Magazines	5h 21 min	3 hours30 min	4 hrs 13	3 hours 30	3 hours

And here’s how I felt this week

Spiritual Gimmes: The Prayer of Bankruptcy

And

R.I.P. Buttercup Duck and Accepting Your Actual Life

And here’s what inspired me

Les Miserables: The Film Akin to a Spiritual Experience

3 Fitness and Weight

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau

Got back into walking after a slowdown caused by two weeks of ice and snow.

Week of	Goal	Actually done
	(km)	(km)
Jan-07		29.6
Jan-14	33.6	Ice 13.6
Jan-21	14.96	snow 16.4
Jan-28	19.69	23.36
Feb-4	25.69

Weight—A week in which I slipped up, dealing with stress with chocolate, cheesecake, icecream and crisps instead of prayer and exercise. Sorry, Jesus!

But now it’s a new week—and with God’s grace, I will rely on God’s power more, and lean more, and abide more.

A cumulative loss of 5 pounds this year.

4 Domestic Order

Some before pictures of bookshelves to work on this week, and my closet

1-DSCN6115_cropped

2-DSCN6132 Well, thanks to walking was able to fit into some cords and jeans just when I was about to give them away. Tidied two dressers and one tallboy. Gave away some books, and gave or threw away 3 pairs of sweats and trousers!

Sorting out my clothes took a while, and I may or may not recover the time. However, it will be easier to find matching clothes when I go out, and so perhaps I will find it easier to be on time. And every area of your house you tidy sort of makes it easier to keep the rest tidy—less of the broken window effect.

I have decided to be minimalist and only wear my favourite colours–red, purple (and colours in between such as cranberry, crimson and burgundy) and peacock blue and stop buying and get rid of other colours. So with some wardrobe staples of black and white cords, turtlenecks and blue jeans matching will no longer be a problem, and I will also get by with fewer clothes.

And here’s the result of a hard day’s work organizing my dressers and an empty bookshelf

BEFORE- some empty

AFTER

Before pictures of my clothes drawers

04-DSCN6073_edited 02-DSCN6071_edited 01-DSCN6070-edit 11-DSCN6080_edited 10-DSCN6079_edited 09-DSCN6078_edited 08-DSCN6077_edited 06-DSCN6075_edited 05-DSCN6074_edited

03-DSCN6072_edited 07-DSCN6076_edited

AFTER reorganizing and giving away some:

DSCN6133_cropped DSCN6136_cropped DSCN6135_cropped DSCN6134_cropped 14-DSCN6131 13-DSCN6130 12-DSCN6129 05-DSCN6122 08-DSCN6125 06-DSCN6123

Minimalism and Simplicity

By Anita Mathias

I love Joshua Becker’s blog Becoming Minimalist and the idea of Minimalism.

The only thing is– minimalism is not particularly a Biblical idea (not opposed to Biblical ideas or values, just not one of them). Abundance is more of a Biblical idea.

And I am too old and too tired to commit passion to something which was not one of Jesus’s values.

Simplicity, on the other hand, simplicity IS a Biblical value.

So I am going to pursue simplicity in all things–and blog about my pursuit as I get deeper into it.

Joshua persuasively describes some of the benefits of minimalism.

Are any of you pursuing either minimalism or simplicity? Tell me about it, please.

In which a Single Tweet–140 characters–can make things happen

By Anita Mathias

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden wrote despairingly. And can tweets, 140 curt characters, make anything happen?

Yes, they can.

* * *

The precious jewels I hold in my heart, which change the way I see and think and live, are all tweetable.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Thoreau, Walden (134 characters).

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (135 characters).

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. Blaise Pascal sums up his deepest spiritual experience (31 characters).

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Gandhi, (55 characters).

Or Ann Voskamp writing of Hagar, dying of thirst within a bowshot of a well, There is always a well. All is well. (38 characters).

Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. C.S. Lewis (66 characters)

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver.”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” C. S. Lewis. 132 characters

* * *

And the ideas of the said King which mean the most to me, and are most life-changing are eminently tweetable.

Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 63 characters.

He who seeks to save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will find it. 114 characters.

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be measured to you. 125 characters.

Yet to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. 96 characters.

Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 125 characters.

Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. Trust in the Father, trust also in me. 101 characters.

* * *

Once we have done the hard work of thinking, our brain instinctively sums it up in a memorable “tweet,” I believe. Mottoes, goals, eureka moments, epiphanies: we unconsciously summarize these in epigrams. Short and sweet. Less is more. Brevity is the soul of wit.

Good politicians instinctively realize that “tweets,” aphorisms are the most effective and best-remembered part of speeches.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Churchill, 61 characters. (I guess that’s what George Osborne’s offering us!)

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. (140 characters) Churchill, 3^rd June, 1940.

And across the pond:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 110 characters Abraham Lincoln, Gettyburg Address

Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. J.F. Kennedy, Inaugural Addess, 82 characters

Read my lips: no new taxes. George Bush, 24 characters

Yes, we did. Preisdent Obama, 10 characters

* * *

And today’s tweets? Do they make a difference?

It depends on who you follow. But, I am guessing that a steady drip of tweets of wisdom, encouragement, and a Godward gaze from @nickygumbel, @johnpiper, @annvoskamp, @rickwarren, @maxlucado (to name some prominent tweeters) surely makes a difference to their readers. Or those of @richardrohrofm, whose most recent tweet is

When younger, I praised God as a worthy exercise and song. Now there is a kind of praising that instead–sings me and sings through me. Wow!

* * *

All these are largely positive tweeters. I wouldn’t long follow a largely negative tweeter: I can generate quite enough negativity for myself, thank you. The thought-provoking, true, optimistic, God-saturated, blood-rosy vision, is just as true as the half-empty glass, so why not contemplate that!

* * *

Our words count. Thinking hard to condense complex thoughts in a couple of sentences is work–and work worthwhile.

Tweeting is good practice for writers. It is training in Orwell’s maxims for good writing:

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use a long word where a short one will do. (104 characters) and in Virginia Woolf’s

Write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one means (83 characters).

It’s encouraging, isn’t it? We can express substantive thoughts, capable of changing the way we (and perhaps our regular readers) see and live and rejoice and trust and love in two or three sentences of 140 characters! In a tweet!

(Edited archive post)

The Process of Sanctification: A Guest Post by Kris Camealy

By Anita Mathias

Holey Wholly Holy

I am honoured to host this excerpt from my blogging friend Kris Camealy’s first book, Holey, Wholly, Holy. The best title of the year, isn’t it?

“We are brought down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up and help us; redeem us because of your unfailing love” (Psalm 44:25-26).

We begin collecting wounds and piling on scars from birth. Ejected from the safety of the womb, we immediately meet with a sinful world ripe with suffering. We grow and endure hardships of varying degrees from the mildly wounding to the most atrocious cruelty. We survive deep cuts and gashes and sometimes, if we can manage, we block the memories, and the pain dulls just enough.

But God has something better in mind. We can do more than simply limp along—His desire is for us to be complete. He longs to restore us, to strengthen us for the call He places on our lives.

In pursuit of life, of our own dreams, of our own magnificent imaginations, we have a knack for running right into the boiling furnace without even seeing it coming—“We sow on bright clear days the seed of our own destruction” (Capon 52).

God’s desire for closer relationship with us requires us to be purified. Though He accepts us as we are, He has even better for us. He loves us too much to leave us in our mess. He collects our broken shards and creates beauty from mere fragments, but the process does not come without pain.

The truth of the Christian life is that we grow most in our faith through adversity. When our faces are pressed against the dirt, that’s when our eyes are most open. The weight of the world presses us lower and it’s there, in the spaces where we can scarcely breathe, that we find He is closest, holding our hands, lifting our spirits, filling up the holes in our cracked-up hearts.

Restoration is a process. It’s not that He doesn’t miraculously heal, certainly there’s plenty of testimony to this kind of miraculous, instant healing. But for most of us, soul healing comes slowly—painfully. You’ll know it when He’s calling you toward His refining fire. The smooth surface you’ve long stretched over, covering the cracks underneath, begins to ripple from the heat. Memories surface, old wounds begin to weep—the cracks widen and hurts spill.

This is not a time to turn and run, though that may be our instinct. This is the time to stand still, to listen to what He’s whispering, and to allow Him to strip you of the covers you’ve been hiding under. Trust me when I say you’ve not got anything He hasn’t seen before. Stand in this fire, let Him purify you—this is how He loves us. This is the process of sanctification.

An excerpt from: Holey, Wholly, Holy: A Lenten Journey of Refinement

* * *

Kris Camealy

As a sequin-wearing, homeschooling, mops-coordinating mother of four, Kris Camealy is passionate about Jesus and her family. Her heart beats to share the hard, but glorious truth about life in Christ with anyone who will listen. When she’s not writing, she gobbles up books like they’re going out of print and plays in the kitchen. She’s been known to take gratuitous pictures of her culinary creations, causing mouths to water all across Instagram. Once upon a time, she ran 10 miles for Compassion International, a ministry for which she serves as an advocate. You can read more of her heart-words in her new book, Holey, Wholly, Holy: A Lenten Journey of Refinement, and on her blog Always Alleluia. Find her on Facebook, twitter and Pinterest.