Baby steps

Full disclosure, friends: I am writing this post purely for the sake of writing a post today, and the content may reflect that. I am okay with this, but I wanted to warn you in case you thought you were going to get something incredibly meaningful out of me this morning.

The truth is, I am sitting on my bedroom floor in my pyjamas, trying to take baby steps.

I have spent the last few weeks trying to do this in a lot of areas, most importantly in my quiet times and also in prioritising reading a little bit every day. I have read every day for the last 34 days and spent time with the Lord every day for the last 14. If I could insert the praise hands emoji here, I would because, honestly, this is such a big deal for me.

I have sorely lacked consistency in my life for the past few years. I used to be so disciplined in my early teens about eating, spending time with God, and not watching a lot of TV. I haven't turned into an absolute slob since then, but a lot of that consistency has faded, little by little, to the point where I'm left looking around at my unstructured life wondering what happened.

A few weeks ago, I was feeling the heavy weight of my lack of discipline and wondering what to do to combat it when God sent me an answer in the form of a Hannah Brencher Craving class. I almost couldn't believe it when I saw it on Instagram. A one hour intensive on the thing I was absolutely craving at that time? I took it as a sign and signed myself up.

On the Tuesday I sat in a café on campus and logged on to hear HB speak before my (uni) class at two. I hadn't done a Craving class before, but I knew it would be amazing because of her heart and her incredible writing. Friends, the class blew me away. In fact, if this is something you struggle with I suggest you stop reading this and head to her website right now to buy the recording and corresponding materials. Seriously, your future self will thank you.

HB covered a lot of things in that hour, but one that really resonated with me was the importance of taking baby steps. A lot of the time I expect perfection of myself overnight. "I'm going to start running tomorrow and I'm sure I'll be able to do 5k!" "I really want to be more consistent with my writing - I'll write for an hour every day!" "I'm going to start each day by spending an hour in prayer!" What you see here is a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of good intentions and a lot of setting myself up for failure.

Those goals are good ones to have, but they are not the goals to set when starting out. I learned that I needed to start with 2k runs and twenty minute writing sessions before I moved on to the bigger goals. The road to the end goal is marked with lots of tiny milestones. They may seem insignificant, but they are actually what make the end goal possible.

So here I am, sprawled out on the floor at 9:42am, trying to take baby steps towards those lofty end goals. My knees are wobbly and unstable, but I'll keep moving until the day I can walk in steady strides.

Here's to the process, friends.