The Simple Life and Novelist Cara Putnam

Today on Words to Go kicks off a week of asking authors what they’ve done to simplify life. I created a poll to the right of these chats. Might I add that although I’ve written on the disciplines (accomplished only when life is simplified) that as soon as I get untangled from the weights and obligations, the temptation to complicate life returns with a vengeance. Novelist Cara Putnam knows this very well. Cara could you share what led you to embrace a simpler life?

CARA: Patty, this is a great question and one I wrestle with. Anyone who knows me would tell you I have a hard time saying no. Over-commitment has been the challenge of my adult life.

PATTY: I wrestle too. And it seems that when I divested of all that did not tie in directly to my writing, here came the deluge and sometimes in a very demanding voice.

CARA: Last year the issue came to a point I couldn't ignore it. I had a baby and two books release as well as started teaching an MBA class -- all in a two-week period. Then I had three books due in three months along with two more classes -- and an infant who still hadn't figured out how to sleep through the night.

PATTY: Teaching college was the final brick in my load too.

CARA: Not to mention a daughter on a gymnastics team, homeschooling, church responsibilities, home life, being a wife. My plate teetered on breaking into pieces.Talk about overload.

PATTY: They do grow up. College is the best sitter I’ve ever had.

CARA: So I'm on a journey to learn how to rest.

PATTY: What calms your spirit, Cara?

CARA: A verse that God's pulled to the forefront as I'm on this journey is Isaiah 30:15: This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says:
"In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,
but you would have none of it.”

PATTY: Yet, it seems we have to grant permission to the self to do this. What is the challenge of this verse?

CARA: In quietness and trust is your strength. That's such a challenging concept. How do we live in a way that no matter how Type A our personality, we always trust God for our strength. That we learn to be quiet even if He's given us a Martha personality.

PATTY: Hand going up.

CARA: What I'm learning is that while God definitely gave me this personality...and a large component of that is being a doer, someone who sees a need and steps in, that doesn't mean He wants me to do everything. Instead, He wants me to focus on the tasks He has for me. And His tasks are not necessarily every task that someone thinks I should do.

PATTY: The ones to watch out for are the individuals—God love them—who neglect to plan in advance. And then there are those who are probably being nudged by God into an arena, but they’re the Jonahs who decided to not only obey and do it, but lay the task in another’s lap. My new banner is not to enable either of these types of folks. And it’s been a battled. My focus is on writing, but because I work at home, folks tend to think that I’m available for everything.

CARA: I'm also focusing on the activities our kids are in. Abigail, my 8 year old, had to make a tough decision in the fall between ballet and gymnastics. Part of me really wanted to make it possible for her to continue to do both, but she'd been invited to higher levels with both activities that required a much bigger time commitment. She made the choice, and our life as a family was less complicated. Now that challenge is multiplying as her 5 year old brother starts t-ball. Thank goodness our almost one year old isn't old enough for activities yet!

PATTY: We cut back on the athletics when it seemed evident our kids were more talented in the arts. It was a wise decision as both sons have scholarships in the arts now.

CARA: I've also consciously worked on how to say no. That two-letter word is extremely hard for me to say, but as I practice, it's slowly becoming an option.

PATTY: It gets easier with practice.

CARA: I've also become more intentional about involving others in leadership to help remove some of the lie that I'm the only one who can do certain things like teach classes at church. There are so many people that God has gifted, but they don't see it. So I love to help pull those gifting out of them.

PATTY: Yes, I’m happier now too as an “adviser.”

CARA: And then there's that wonderful invention called the crockpot. My friend Heather Corbin has a ministry for moms www.simplefamilysuppers.com that has been a lifesaver for this person who hates grocery shopping and figuring out what's for supper at 5 p.m. She sends out monthly menus with shopping lists and recipes and it's been a lifesaver by removing one stressor from my days -- when I remember to use it LOL

PATTY: Thank you so much for sharing that link.

CARA: I've also started being much more intentional about having the older two help with chores. They are old enough and it's a help. It also means that I've relaxed my standards a tad -- perfection isn't as important as the peace of a clean house without the stress of trying to do it all to an impossible standard. As the sign says, if you want to see my house, make an appointment. If you want to see me, come on over.

PATTY: It’s actually part of character training to have children participate in the household chores. And, especially sons, need to realize that what they live in is as much their responsibility as females. How is your life different now and what about simplifying has enriched your life?

CARA: There is a certain level of pandemonium that young families have, but as I seek to simplify life, my stress level has lowered -- most of the time. There are still points particularly when a deadline looms and I'm working late into the night that I have to watch myself. But as I try to adopt simplicity, the tenor of our home has improved.

PATTY: Learning that every surface doesn’t have to be spit-shined is a weight off. Cara and I give everyone reading this the imperfection of a slightly cleaned home.
I was killing myself on Saturdays trying to clean every baseboard and the tops of doorposts. Now I focus on one area on Saturday morning and will get to the rest in the following Saturdays. And for big chores, like cleaning out closets, I drop the regimen until the big chores are finished.

CARA: I love knowing that I don't have to be perfect. Instead, I just need to keep seeking to obey God and ask for His wisdom on what our family should do at this season.

PATTY: Great wisdom from a mother of young children. Thank you, Cara!

CARA: Thank you, Patty. And I’m giving away two books today.

PATTY: We love you anyway, but thank you for your generosity.

CARA: I’m giving away Deadly Exposure for lovers of romantic suspense. And I’ll give away Canteen Dreams for historical romance.

PATTY: We entertain lovers of all genres here at Words to Go. Thank you so much, Cara.

Tomorrow novelist Susan Davis will be sharing her thoughts and wisdom as we continue in our very practical discussion, “The Simple Life.”

The Simple Life

“I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily—like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity.”

--Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There are many types of sabbaticals, some planned and some forced. I’ve found that when I don’t plan for them that soon I’m forced into one. For many years, I was the “good” employee who didn’t take my vacation time. As an author, there is no allotted vacation time. When I stop my work, there is guilt over not writing. My friends are like me. We writers continue in the same frenetic pace from which we had hoped to escape when we quit our day jobs to write. It is not the life imagined. We simply traded the color of our shackles.

This week at Words to Go we will chat with three authors about The Simple Life. There are authors who have stopped their lives in order to renew and replenish; and there are a few authors who have pared down life in order to preserve it.

Preservation is an important reason to simplify. We rid ourselves of the debts that have shackled us so that we are no longer a bondservant to life’s overlords. If we spend our minutes paying off debtors rather than accomplishing Christ-honoring works, then we are slaves to our debtors rather than freemen to our dreams.

Free people own their hours, especially their down time.

As an exercise, if you’d like, you may keep a list of how you spend your free time this week and this weekend. Then categorize your list into two sections. Make one list the things that you imagined you’d do in your dream life. For the other, make a list of the things you do because you are shackled to it. Then when your list is about a week old, ask what you could do to leave behind the shackles and embrace the dream. And it’s a good time to assess the dream too. Is my dream achievable? What measures must I take to achieve it—such as sacrificing some of the excesses of life to achieve it. Also, does the dream include serving others; and at the opposite end of that deficiency, do you do nothing but serve others—an equally exhausting debt. People who tend to “only serve” might have fallen into the pit of “existential debt” or subconsciously trying to rectify a wrong from an old childhood wound.

Ask yourself, “What do I carry out of necessity and what can I lay down?”

Join Patty this week on Words to Go chatting with authors Randy Alcorn, author of The Treasure Principle and many best selling novels, and authors Cara Putnam author of Deadly Exposure and Susan Davis author of Maine Brides. Those leaving feedback will be entered in a drawing for book gives this Saturday.

Fun Fact: Patricia Hickman co-wrote Secrets From the Treadmill--Discover God's Rest in the Busyness of Life with Pastor Pete Briscoe, son of celebrated pastor-authors Stuart and Jill Briscoe.

In Search of Thanksgiving

(this is the final installment in our Thanksgiving Saga. Thank you for joining us this week)

The boys shouted, "Restaurant!"
It wasn't a true restaurant, not in the sense that we mothers classify an eatery as restaurant. It was in actuality a singles bar. Finding the parking easy, we cautiously marched single file through the guarded entrance. A big bouncer stepped in front of me, blocking us from entering.
I asked the bouncer, “Would it be all right if we ordered something to eat?”
I don’t remember that he answered us in actual words. He looked down at me as if I was a pathetic nuisance. Then when he herded us inside—far corner to the left along with two other starving groups of parents from England--that we came to understand that we had misguidedly stepped outside the bounds of permissable culture. The bouncer implied in no uncertain terms that we should sit still and not agitate the unattached customers with our familial bliss.
Unblinkingly, the waitress told us, “You have to leave by ten. It’s kareoke night.” She glanced nervously up and down the row of single customers who stared at us from the barstool gallery, their eyes glowing like jittery rabbits.
“We promise to leave by ten,” I said. “We just need food and then we’ll be out of the way.”
The British father said to me, “We didn’t know about Thanksgiving. There’s not a restaurant open in the entire city. Our kids are about starved, as are we.”
How well we knew. We had phoned to the farthest edges of the county. Even the Cracker Barrel and the Chinese restaurant were shut down.
The bouncer explained to every incoming single customer that we would be gone by ten, locking gazes with me as he said it.
After we huddled around our table, my eyes took in the surroundings. Almost surreal, a smoky haze torched our senses while our oldest son grumbled, "This is only the worst Thanksgiving we've ever had."
“Here’s what we’ll do,” I said, feeling that somewhere in the choking cloud of fried chips and Texas Pete’s hot sauce that each of us surely had something for which we could be grateful. “Everyone share one thankful thought.”
First there was the collective groan. Then, we found a consensus. We all decided we were thankful for our family and for God's comfort. As each one spoke, my eyes kept roving to the shelf of items for sale behind the guys. Not so anyone else would notice, I made out the bar’s retail offerings--a whole plethora of little nude ceramic women clinging to cups, their limbs curving to make coffee mug handles, some upright, others upside-down or spraddle-legged with long bare-legged handles. Turquoise colored ashtrays formed to look like beds held more of the naked ceramic girls, only these ladies were sprawled across the ashtrays, gazing up flirtatiously from their tiny stark white faces. The bouncer was still managing us with his eyes. I imagined leaping in front of the display case and covering it with what fragments remained of my maternal instinct when all at once a tyke escaped from the herd of friends and siblings at the table next to us, the Londoners. The fugitive English child headed straight into a group of frightened singles. The bouncer lunged forward and grabbed the little boy, tossed him up over his head as though going for a long pass, and hurled him back at the astonished parents.
The dad, using his most distinctive British elocution turned to me and said, "They're bloody well good kids, really, once you get used to them!"
But I was too shaken by the bouncer’s cat-like reflexes to respond. Not wanting to be hurtled through the air myself, I stayed in my chair, bound to the rules for people packing children. To try and cover the nude ceramic girls with a mom’s fiery-faced quintessence was kin to social suicide. So I asked Jared to please not look at the shelf behind his brother. My youngest son sat rigid fearing who-knows-what while his twenty-two year old brother turned completely around in his chair to gawk.
Finally our food arrived. We wolfed down our Thanksgiving meal of buffalo wings and homemade potato chips, bid farewell to the mollified Brits, and headed home.
Randy surprised us by pulling into the take-out lane of a Krispy Kreme donut shop. These places are all over the eastern seaboard, turning out donuts assembly-line fashion behind an clear acrylic wall so that patrons may watch in plain sight the wondrous birth of perfection; we’re talking hundreds of donuts filing past, dropping into the log-flume-like vats and then finishing up perfectly browned and coated in melted icing. The most extreme climax of elation however is found in nearing one of these establishments and finding that the assembly lines are moving and the donuts are hot off the rollers and you know because the Krispy Kreme donuteurs alert you by flipping on the shop’s bright red neon sign that, when turned on, reads Hot Now!
We pulled into the take-out lane as the boys yelled, "Hot Now!" We ordered a dozen hot ones to-go to top off our Thanksgiving feast. Warm, delectable morsels melted on our tongues, finer than chef’s pastry.
Driving down the darkened interstate, we all told funny "Jessi" stories like the one we always told on Christmas Eve, how she used to plead for us to tell Santa to just leave the stuff outside on the porch. She never wanted a strange man in a red suit slipping into her house while she slept. Or the way she insisted that serving scarcely eaten meat on holidays was cruel to animals. Or the manner in which she saw the handiwork of God in every living thing.
It should have been our worst Thanksgiving. But somehow it was the worst and the best. Our family realized that Thanksgiving did not embody a fancy spread of poultry and stuffing but instead a feast of the heart. A thankful heart could be drummed up as simply as faith itself if we measured our blessings by the breadth of our love for one another rather than the girth of our stomachs.
Before we pulled onto the ramp that would aim us toward home, I heard Randy whisper, "Thank you, God. Just . . . thank you." I echoed the sentiment. Instinctively, he and I joined hands. Our youngest son sang another carol and his brother joined him in harmony. It sounded otherworldly and peaceful. Then all grew quiet and I thought I detected the music of stars, distant yet not so far away.

I was thankful for my family and our time together. I realized that God's grace is present even when my holiday feast is reduced to buffalo wings and hot donuts.
When served with a side of grateful love, all fare is choice. All fellowship is meat for the soul.

I hope and pray your Thanksgiving was simply joyful!

Kiva and Planning for Simplicity

Randy came across a website called Kiva where individuals may make loans to people in emerging countries who use the funds to start their own small businesses. This is a win-win situation. The loan program is highly successful and contributes to the sustainability of impoverished individuals who do not want a hand-out but want to make it on their own.

Randy and I are working toward being entirely debt free this year so that we can give to these kinds of causes and other ministries. I’ll talk more about that as our plans progress. I met a fellow a few years ago at a Thomas Nelson banquet who was pitching his program and book, The Total Money Make-Over. Dave Ramsey is very down-to-earth and his materials are so easy to understand. We’ll let you know how our money make-over works out.

We’re planning on buying a small cottage that we can make-over into some really great intimate work and relax areas. Our home is a really nice home but it has a lot of unused space especially since our caboose is headed for college in the fall. We’ve been studying a book called The Not So Big House. The concept is to buy small and then expand the spaces into really great living spaces that function specifically for you and your family. For instance, we seldom use a formal dining area and we never use a formal living room. But we’d love a cozy reading area with natural light that overlooks a garden. People who adopt this lifestyle are called cultural creatives. We don’t know if we fit the type, but we are looking forward to being completely debt free and living in a home that suits us and our scaled down lives.

Treasure

I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately. I think about heaven often and its contents, the people we love who have beaten us to the place we long to see. I shouldn’t assume everyone thinks about heaven all the time. But if you’ve lost someone you love and miss them then perhaps you’ve caught yourself thinking about where they are and what their eyes are seeing right at that moment.I didn’t realize until now that when my sights are truly fixed on heaven, it causes everything in me to shift. I have grown so uncomfortable with accumulating things. It all seems so cumbersome. No,I’m not going to make my hubby and seventeen-year-old move into a refrigerator box. But I have grown weary of filling up rooms with furniture that often sit empty, closets with clothes that hang for weeks and months unworn. It is as though this mental window into heaven has given me a glimpse into the pain of humanity. So how can I sit comfortably when others have no place to sleep?

In his book The Treasure Principle, Randy Alcorn talks about the Macedonian believers who “gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability.” (2 Cor. 8:3), a people who became so zealous in their generosity, they had to be compelled to stop.Compelled to stop. So I’m not just talking about the surrender of one's own pocketbook but the transformation that God does in us to bring us to this point. Generous giving can become an addictive compulsion. We become like Scrooge having awakened to find that we can celebrate Christmas every day of the year. “I’m as giddy as a schoolboy!”

Randy Alcorn says “Giving is the only antidote to materialism.”

It’s so completely true that I want to etch it into my desk. When I am blinded by materialism, my soul becomes sick and my eyes grow dim. I can no longer see out that spiritual window into my brother’s pain. Please, God, let my prayer be that I will give until I’m in a race to try and out give You! Let me run that race free of the weights that would tie me down. Make my life a clearing house for your wealth of righteousness, but let it not linger for even a day, not as long as a child is in need of bread or a world in need of compassion.

“I have held many things in my hands and I have lost them all. But whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.” --Martin Luther

The Satisfied Writer

“The taking up of the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the
continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.”
John Henry Newman

Today I was salivating over a job that would take me away from home for several weeks, a writer’s residency in another state. The writer-in-residence would teach one class a week and then spend the rest of her time doing nothing but writing. It sounds heavenly except for the fact that during those weeks away from home my duties as a wife, mom, and ministry leader would fall into neglect. But the thought of it lured my thoughts into a tranquil reverie.

Seriously, do you ever daydream about a life where all you have to do is write? No taking care of children or spouses or church duties. No answering emails or telephone calls. No strain or stress of the responsibilities to hold body and soul together. Morning and night, writing and more writing.

In the middle of my daydream, reality broke through. I imagined that hour in the afternoon where my youngest son comes lugging his book bag up the stairs, grinning, telling me about his day, the prom and the girl he’s invited to escort there, or the good grade he made on a test. And then I imagined missing that or missing my oldest running in between college classes and his job to give me a kiss. I get a kiss in the morning and one at night. He never forgets me. Then there’s that spoon thing I’d miss every evening when my husband crawls into bed next to me and we talk about all that happened that day and what the Lord did and how hard it was or how amazed we were. Or excited. Or let down, but still, even that is living. Or what would I miss if I couldn’t attend my small group? Would I continue to grow and stay challenged to mature in my faith? And what of the myriad of people I meet in my life because the Lord has seen fit to place me right here in this tiny apex of the universe that is occupied only by me and God in me? How would my life be enriched without those generous souls?

Then I wondered what in the world I’d write about if all I ever did was write, write, write. Would there be another story to tell and would it be worth telling? In Jeremiah, God says, “I will satiate the soul of the priest with abundance, And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the LORD.” There are times when carrying the load of wordsmith feels too heavy and I want to give it a new shape, dissatisfied with the old shape. I strain under it and fantasize about relief. I forget what goodness is poured into my life through, as John Newman once said, “the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.” I have to remind myself that the load I carry is not one of words but of souls. My hope is that I’m able one day to say to God that the things I carried in life were, okay, heavy; but only with humans.