Intentional 2019

I have seen people through the years have a new word for a new year. I never considered doing this but started thinking about it a lot today on our 4 hour trip home from my in-laws house.

The word I came up with for 2019 is INTENTIONAL. The definition of intentional is done on purpose, deliberate.

The last 2 years have been crazy in our family. I felt like we were always flying by the seat of our pants. We have had to be so flexible and our plans have changed often. I know that we will still need flexibility and that only God knows the future. But I felt like so many things in our life weren’t completed to the potential it could have been because we were barely hanging on and surviving.

So I want to be intentional this year. What does this look like?

• I want to be intentional in my walk with God. When I was a younger adult (because I like to think I’m still a young adult. 35 is still a young adult, right?) I had such a guilty feeling if I didn’t read my Bible daily. It wasn’t a desire I had but I felt I HAD to. I am slowly getting through this guilt and finding that I long to be in His word. So I want to be intentional with my devotions and prayer life. And I want my girls to learn from this and not have their own guilty feelings in the future. I want to get back into church. I’ve gotten out of the habit of Sunday School, Sunday night and Wednesday night services this past year. And let’s face it…Sunday morning worship services sometimes turn into a circus since I have loud kids sometimes. I need to be spiritually fed and I need to be intentional about it.
• I want to be intentional in my marriage. I know I’m not as patient or as understanding as I should be. Some days by the time he comes home from work, I’m so stressed out. I check out some evenings instead of trying to spend time with him.
• I want to be intentional with my girls. I want each of them to realize how special and loved they are by first God and by their mommy and daddy. I want to take the time to listen to them. I want to play games, do crafts, get messy and bake with them. I want to try to do more one on one things with each of them.
• I want to be intentional in my friendships. I want to spend more time cultivating those friendships. Asking how they are doing. I want to have courage to make new friends. And to take the time to go on play dates (with kids of course), go out to coffee or to dinner. God has shown me a lot about true friends this year as I went through such a hard year. He has weeded out some toxic friendships that would likely cause me stress in the future too.
• I want to be intentional in our homeschooling. I want to go on more field trips (they always ask for this) and set up more play dates. I want to encourage them in their interests. I want to have a better schedule where we complete all our subjects and still have plenty of time for reading, Bible time and games.
• I want to be intentional with my health. I am realizing through my grief that I can’t ignore my body. I need to grieve. I need to cry. I need to go to counseling. I need to take my medicine. But I also need to stop ignoring healthy habits such as drinking water, making better food choices, eat less fast food and to exercise. I also want to make more time for me. Take the time for a bath instead of a shower. Read books. Stop escaping into TV shows to avoid reality (yes, I did that a lot in 2018).
• I want to be intentional in my house work. I am not good at housekeeping. At all. Plus add in a small house, 4 extra people living here and lots and lots of stuff. It is almost always a mess. And when it is a mess, I get overwhelmed and just ignore it. I want to be intentional about cleaning. Including my girls in cleaning. And we need to purge. So much junk.
• I also want to be intentional about our purchases. I guess we don’t really need 20 cereal choices. I also don’t have to shop a sale. We have so much stuff we could get rid of!
• I want to be intentional with family time. I already mentioned more games, but I want us to go out as a family more (we typically avoid this because of our little active 1 year old). But I want to go on hikes. Explore places. Go to Holiday world. And have such a good time on our tentative trip to Disney/Harry Potter World. We have let so many of these fun family moments slip us by these past couple years due to having a newborn or my dad being sick. But I don’t want to keep pushing them aside. These things are important.

As I was thinking through this word, a Bible verse came to mind. So I think this verse will be our verse for the year.

So I hope I am intentional in my life this year…no matter what circumstances come our way. Bring on 2019!