weekend renewal

My son scrolled through my posts not long ago and asked why nearly every post is titled Weekend Renewal. I had to explain that it is the title I chose for my weekend posts. Not understanding the busy demands of being a wife, mother, friend, full-time employee, and student, who is also trying to help her husband with a home project that she really, really wants to get finished so the house can be put back in order and she can smile at the beauty of it, he incredulously asked why they were the only ones. I gave him that “oh, you don’t know anything look” and stammered that lately the weekend is the only time I have to write even a few words. And they can’t be big words, or deep thoughts, because my brain is mush. Obviously, ridiculously long run-on sentences are perfectly okay, and to be expected when one wants to share what is really going on in life.

And this is life. Not busy. I have a thing for women saying how busy they are all the time, as if they don’t realize that the person they are speaking with is just as busy and has just as few hours in a day. But it is full, and it is full of the things that matter to me, and sometimes good things that matter get pushed aside for the things that matter most, because seriously, we really cannot do it all. Sometimes we have to set a good thing aside for a time (like blog posts that are really getting traffic-jammed in my mind). Or we have to say no to friends or family, though we hate to, because we know our limits.

We press on in the work God has called us to do, embracing what we cannot do as much as what we can do. Accepting His grace for this day, for work that is sometimes hard, for interruptions that He ordains, for tears over hard decisions, and joy over bonding moments with friends. Sometimes this is life, one weekend renewal after another. Because we all need a day of rest.

If you have a few moments this weekend, here are a couple good reads:

12 Ways to Preserve Christian Unity

Satan hates God and therefore he hates God’s people, the church. His great plan for the church is to cause Christians—true believers who ought to be together in the gospel—to find ways of disagreeing among themselves, to divide, to be bitter and jealous, and ultimately to “bite and devour one another” (Gal. 5:15). Here are twelve ways that you can repulse Satan’s attacks.

Ordinary Christians and a Great Commission

This kind of a life is respectable before both Christians and non-Christians, before those inside the church and outside. This quiet, hard-working life displays love to Christians because it allows the Christian to avoid dependence on charity and, far better, allows him to extend it to those who genuinely need it. This quiet, hard-working life displays the power of the gospel to unbelievers as a model of a respectable and proper kind of life marked by dignity and industry. Paul assumes that this kind of life will model gospel living and provide opportunities to share the gospel with others.

Paul does not hold this out as a bare minimum kind of life, he does not hold it out as a good enough kind of life. He holds out this ordinary life as the life that pleases God and fulfills his Commission. He demands nothing more.

May you find joy in the beautiful moments you are given this weekend. Bless you, friends.