A Journey from Surviving to Thriving

It’s the best Job in the World!   You’ve raised your children and sent them out into the world to build their own lives and raise their families.  Now is the time to sit back, relax, and enjoy life and the fruits of that earlier responsibility.   Grandchildren are described in Scripture as the “crown of the aged” (Proverbs 17:6).  So maybe part of the grandparent job description indeed is to enjoy, and even “spoil”, those grandchildren.  But it’s also much more than that. An author has once penned, “ What children need most are the essentials that grandparents provide in abundance.  They give unconditional love, kindness, patience, humor, comfort, lessons in life.  And, most importantly, cookies. ”  Yes, cookies are very important too!  Scripture makes it clear that as grandparents, we have an awesome opportunity and responsibility to invest our lives in those grandkids.   By the way, this is not to suggest that everyone over 50 should have one or more grandchildren in their lives. Som

I love my hearing aids.  I value the fact that they help me hear better, but even more, I love that when I don’t want to hear, I can turn them off! 😀   Through the years I’ve learned that we tend to live in an air bubble of thick impregnable walls — walls of “busyness” and “noise” such that we simply can not hear God when He tries to speak to us.  And in a sense until that wall is broken down, we’re on our own.  God is unable to guide us through life — and the enemy loves it.   Our last post focused on “The Gift of Margin” in which we looked at the importance of slowing down in our exceptionally busy culture.  The purpose of this post is to discover  what God says about silence and solitude and explore how we might experience this more fully.  We’ll look at how both gifts — the gift of margin and the gift of silence and solitude — help us truly thrive. Ruth Haley Barton, in her insightful book, Invitation to Solitude and Silence , shares a comment from her spiritual director — “Ruth,

I’m not one to live with lots of regrets.   But in some reflective moments as a seasoned senior, I have concluded that if I were to live my life over again, I would make at least this one change.   I would allow for more margin in my regular activity schedule. Several posts ago, I wrote a two-part series on “Living in the Margin”.  “Margin” in that case referred to the condition of no longer being a part of the core of any organization, team, or relational circle, and now on the outside fringe of that activity, one tends to feel out-of-touch and powerless.  People in the core are “in the know”; people on the fringe (i.e., in the margin) are watching and wondering.   The term “margin”, as I’m using it in this post, is different.  This particular “margin”  I’m writing about now was popularized by Richard Swenson in his book Margin in which he describes margin as “…having breath left at the top of the staircase, money left at the end of the month or sanity left at the end of adolescen