Author Archives: Amy Jane

How busy do we have to be as Christians?

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Currently Reading
The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits
By Richard A. Swenson, Richard A. Swenson M.D.
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I found a good reminder today in a book called The Overload Syndrome.  It’s a book that asks readers first to recognize they have limits then encourages them to live inside those limits, despite all they could be doing, in order to remain healthy and (even) best available to God.

“God does not have to depend on human exhaustion to get His work done.  God is not so desperate for resources to accomplish His purposes that we have to abandon the raising of our children in order to accommodate Him.  God is not so despairing of where to turn next that He has to ask us to go without sleep for five nights in a row.  Chronic overloading is not a prerequisite for authentic Christianity.  Quite the contrary, overloading is often what we do when we forget who God is.

“Someone has said, ‘God can do in twenty minutes what it takes us twenty years to do.’  Let’s trust more and do less.  Is it busyness that moves mountains…or faith?”  (pp. 36, 72).

I have a remarkably empty calendar right now.  Perhaps the emptiest it’s been since I could set my own schedule: all I have in stone is church/Sunday school on Sunday and ToastMasters for an hour on Mondays.

And I have rarely felt this tired.  Granted, that has everything to do with being pregnant, sick, and corralling a house with 2 toddlers.

But, the best thing about being tired (and I like this) is that it makes me ruthlessly evaluate every new (or old) opportunity that comes my way.

It makes me look at what need is being met in this activity– either by me or for me– and if it’s not important (enough), it is very easy to let it go.  This awareness also makes it relatively easy to occasionally pick-up new things w/o feeling guilty.  The cost/benefits ratio is the easiest to see it’s been in years.

Muscle-memory

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Do we consider (I wonder) the way we’re training our mind/will/emotions in our daily responses to things?

Earlier this week a friend my mom’s age was mentioning to me how her mother’s dementia was worsening. This friend described how hard it was getting to shift her mother’s focus off the negative (real and imagined) of her own world.

I said that, since we all have to choose to be positive anyway (negative seems to come so naturally), perhaps her mother was just past that place of being able to make that choice. The daughter looked me in the eye and said, “It’s a muscle-memory thing.”

I’ve been thinking about that since Tuesday– Apparently this woman used to find the negative, even when she had the choice, and now that she has less and less capacity to choose, she’s paying for it.

That phrase my friend used seems so spot-on: “Muscle memory.”

It makes me think of my guitar practice, and how exciting it is when my fingers just go where they need to be, without my having to think about it. They’re beginning to be trained, but only because I made it happen at first, by doing and thinking about it, over and over.

First entry: who I am (in summary)

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(Originally published on Xanga.)

Just last night I gave my first speech for Toastmasters. That’s a club where members learn and practice giving speeches. The first required presentation is called the Icebreaker, where you (basically) introduce yourself to the group. Since it is as good a description as any I can come-up with, here is my introduction, to (from?) myself.

I found an encouraging quote from C.S. Lewis early in my college career: “God makes each soul unique. If he had no use for all these differences I do not see why he should have created more souls than one. Be sure the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.”

I’m still in the process of de-mystifying, but here are three of the most significant categories in my life: First, my “unchangings,” being a Christian, wife and a mother; second, my business efforts; and third, language and music.

I call the first category my “unchangings” b/c they are things I have made decisions about, and I live the rest of my life within this framework. For example, as a committed Christian, I have developed a world-view that affects all the other elements of my universe. By believing in a God that is intimately involved in my tiny human existence, I believe the choices I make matter to him, and so are important.
As a wife and mother, I am the manger and keeper of my home, and my children are my long-term project. They are an investment I pour in to daily that I pray will produce great dividends for the world around me, and for a more eternal kingdom. My current dividends are small: a snuggle, or one child being spontaneously kind to the other. Their desire to sing was a larger and earlier dividend than I guessed it would be.

Sometimes feeling in conflict to the time I must spend with my children is the fledgling business of Gordian Knot Productions. I wanted to call it Gordian Knot something, because I had these fabulous quilts I could make and use for the logo, but also because the story of the gordian knot is a story about finding a new or unusual solution to a problem that was presumed unsolvable. GKP is about telling stories, and using stories to teach, and it is also about Teaching the Fertility Awareness Method– a behavioral form of birth control, that it seems most people have never heard of.

The most curious part of myself to me, probably b/c it is the least defined, is my writing and music; what might be described as my “artistic” side, or self-expression, though sometimes those categories fit about as well as me trying to describe my naturally blond hair as self-expression. All of these are more about who I am; part of the way I view myself and interact with the world:

I write long letters, dabble in fiction, and have been coerced, occasionally, to write poems. I’ve never written a song, but music, especially singing, has been a part of my world longer than I can remember. I come from a family of singers, and used to be convinced anyone could sing. It was as natural as talking. (easier, in fact, b/c you don’t have to wonder what you’re saying next– it’s already decided) There is a quote that’s been on my wall for the last 8-years or more: “For me, music exists to elevate us as far as possible above every-day existence.”

Because my talent in singing is genetic and was acquired through absorption, rather than discipline, I’ve always felt like less of a musician than friends who’ve actually studied. Mainly because of this I’ve been teaching myself piano and guitar. The process has been a long one, squeezed as it is between the more pressing pursuits of family and business, but it is sweet.

It reminds me of another quote that was good for me to find recently. Also from C.S. Lewis: “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own” or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life– the life God is sending one, day by day.”

“Writing in the Dark” 2006

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I think this will be the funniest to those who have lived in AK (or somewhere) enough to be familiar with the whole “dry-cabin” lifestyle.

This is the result of a 10-minute writing exercise at a workshop I attended a few weeks ago. It was really fun: I was off eating good food, writing and listening from 9-4 one Saturday. Great fun.

For this one, the guy directing introduced the idea of “Claytomancy,” which he called a form of divination based on the odd words or phrases we overhear and/or stick with us. I haven’t been able to find that word anywhere else, but it’s an interesting idea.

He made the assumption that we, as a group of writers, would have these trails of words circulating in our minds, and passing out 3×5 cards asked us to write either a phrase that’s been on our minds or 3 individual words that have been sticking with us. Then he collected and redistributed them.

My phrase was “He was afraid of plumbing.”

Plumbing was one of those things he knew he’d never understand. The dank dripping darkness that never left the slimy pipes of his imagination.

He would never open those cabinet doors. The trash can was available to the cat, the dog, the children, because he couldn’t bring himself to open those doors under the sink. He only knew the boiler room existed because it would wake, dragon-like, to periodically shake the house.

He would have jumped off a bridge to escape his torment– but didn’t know what would meet him in the river.

That’s why he moved to a dry cabin: to get away from the plumbing.


Turns out this line was from the workshop leader, and after living in Unalaska w/o plumbing for 15-20 years, and only having running water for about 2 years (he even refused to use it at first), he said in the end that this all was truer than he cared to admit.

And sorry to anybody else who doesn’t find this funny– maybe it’s a “you had to be there” moment, where the youngest person in the group is trying to read something ridiculous to a group of strangers, straight-faced.