In the quiet

Stress....we all have it, and for the most part don't want it or need it. I've heard that there is a good kind of stress and then obviously the bad kind. Too much of the bad and your health starts to become affected. Clearly we don't want the bad stress, but more often than not it decides to take up residence in our heart and head and then sticks around long enough to start affecting the soul.

The other morning I sat down at the kitchen table with my coffee and felt like for the first time in awhile I had a quiet moment. Quiet heart, quiet head, and quiet soul. And then it hit me, like a violently shaking wind...I had lost sight of something important. I had let stress and all its ill effects take over and had lost sight of what I needed.

I've journaled off and on since I was a young girl. It brought me peace and gave me a place to scribble feelings and thoughts. With the new year, I decided that I would try to journal and read more and I kept it up, but it soon fell to the wayside when life took over. Yeah, I used the word life. And really I mean stress....but isn't that how we confuse them? We get so caught up in the stress, some people crave it and seek it out, that we actually forget about living life. I get it. Something happens that throws off a regular routine and everything else seems to go to hell. We've lived this way, accepted this way of life for so long, that we don't even bat and eye that it's not how it's supposed to be. We've bought into the idea that if we're not stressed we're not living. Oh, how wrong that thinking is.

So in the moment of quiet, I grabbed my journal and a devotional book. Opened it to that day and there it was. A message I had needed to hear during all of the time of stress. It calmed me and ignited me all in the same. I had allowed the stress to take over and consume me. It took away my quiet. It stole from me time...time to enjoy and embrace what I've been given. The stress was slowly stealing my joy and I was allowing it because "that's life." No. No its not.

It's easy to declutter our houses and simplify our possessions, but decluttering our hearts and minds is its own challenge. We have to prioritize and let go of what is stealing our joy. We have to reset our hearts and minds to no longer accept the lie that stress is feeding us. It's time to put stress in its place and allow joy to take over.