R & R...and R & R (Part 2 of 4)

RETREAT – RESTORE – RENEW – REPEAT

I love a simple recipe – especially one with a few ingredients. It just makes cooking so much easier because you can almost memorize the instructions and ingredients. This simplicity then makes success more likely. When you’re successful, you feel a sense of pride, and that can be a good thing.

Our ‘recipe’ that we’ve tried and tasted over the last year is just what you see above. While we don’t announce this recipe to our children, we do enact them. For us, this recipe is more like a rhythm within the recipe. Just like when you cook simple dishes, you often repeat the rhythm within the recipe as a way of paying closer attention to it.

When we say that we retreat, we don’t yell, “RETREAT!” We model the rhythm of it by calling everyone to the table. It’s a moment that we all know signifies a specific action. So, our next rhythmic action we follow in this ‘recipe’ is: RESTORE.

When we run low on ingredients, we know it’s time to RESTORE.

When we run low on nutrients, we know it’s time to RESTORE.

Our ingredients provide us nutrients. What we are learning is that the key to restoration is learning how to recognize when they both run low. Then we know it's time to RESTORE.

Our family shares a meal together at our table at least 4-5 nights per week. Sometimes it’s more. This means we run out of ingredients. So, we buy groceries every week because we run low on supply. It’s a natural rhythm for most of us.

We run low on other ingredients, too, don’t we? And those ingredients aren’t necessarily food items. What are those ingredients?

We need someone to see us. We need someone to hear us. Being seen and heard are two ingredients that run low in a busy world. These ingredients provide us with the proper nutrients for us to grow both mentally and physically.

When others see and hear us, we have peace of mind and encouragement to grow and go. Just as the nutrients deplete until our next meal, so the nutrients of someone seeing and hearing us deplete as well.

It’s time to RESTORE the nutrients by supplying the ingredients. When we RESTORE those items, we RESTORE them to a certain level. Then, it’s time to RENEW, which we’ll talk about next time.

Check your ‘grocery’ list. What do you need to RESTORE this week? What do others at your table need to RESTORE? See them. Hear them. RESTORE them.