How To Get The Most Out Of Your Reset.

Does hitting the reset button mean starting over? I would argue no. In fact I would argue that starting back at square one is what ends up getting us into this kind of place of overwhelm with our stuff.

Sometimes you can just suck it up and go back to square one, but most of the time I don’t think you need to do that to reset our systems. Especially if you’re overwhelmed, which is why you want to hit the reset button in the first place. Hitting the reset button just might mean jumping back in, wherever we are in the system. 

Let’s talk laundry for example. Let’s say you have gotten completely behind on laundry…..yep…you’re right, let’s say you were completely caught up on laundry at one time…recently…and now you’re behind again. It’s not the system, the system works..when we do the work…but sometimes we get off track because well life. So how do we reset this situation?

You just start with the system where you’re at. Let’s use my laundry system for example. Let’s say it’s Monday which means it’s laundry day for my kids. Doesn’t matter if I have mountains of laundry, just wash, dry and put away a load of kids laundry. The next day is towels day, so I’m going to wash, dry and put away towels. Wednesday is kids laundry day and at this point I’m feeling a little more in the groove, that small load of kids clothes didn’t take too long, so I can also fold my laundry that’s been sitting on the couch and put it away. The next day is sheets day and I’ll wash and put the sheets back on the beds. And all of the sudden, I’m back in my system and I feel a lot more capable of catching up the rest of the stuff. And ta-da, now we’re reset. 

Here’s the alternative.  

It’s Monday so I’m supposed to wash kids clothes, but my clothes are on the couch, and I need to put those swim towels away, and on no I totally forgot to wash the kids sheets on Thursday so I probably need to do those. Now I have a mountain of laundry to face and I don’t want to do it. So I do the towels because they’re easy, and I let the kids clothes go another day, I mean what’s one more day? Now when I do decide to do the kids clothes I have more to do, which feels overwhelming so I take care of my own clothes that were on the couch, and now I have skipped kids laundry twice and I have twice to deal with in the small amount of time that I have allotted myself for laundry because after all, I’m overwhelmed and I don’t want to do it. And my laundry system isn’t supposed to take up much time, this feels like a lot of time so there much be a problem with my system and I need to find a new one.  And all of the sudden….I’m pretty much where I started. Great. 

And you can imagine this is the same stuff that happens with pretty much any system you have. Whether it’s for dishes, decluttering, dealing with paper, meal prep, I mean pick your poison on this one. 

The key to getting reset isn’t to turn everything around in one fell swoop. It’s really just to jump back into the system and pick it where you left off. You’ll end up saving yourself energy and when it comes to these homemaking tasks…energy is time and time is money. 

Now if you don’t have a system or if you like the word routine better…a routine for things like laundry, meal planning, dishes, paper happen in your home, we can talk about getting some of those set up in future videos. Or maybe you have a system and you’ve given it the good old fashioned college try and it truly is not working. I have had those in the past too. It’s okay to switch out things that aren’t working. It’s not okay to completely scratch something that had worked for us in the past without taking a good hard look at why it’s not working now. It may just be that we aren’t trying to jump into the cycle, but that we’re trying to start from square one. 

This is where grace comes in to play. Now I talk a lot on this channel about grace, and that’s because it’s important. 

We have real lives that we are living every day and we aren’t sovereign over our own lives. Which means often things go completely out of our control and we have to choose how best to respond. This is where grace comes in. We have the freedom to lean into our faith and trust that we can get back on track, not because we can be in control of everything and make all the little cogs turn exactly the right way, but because God is in control in making things go exactly the right way and we are learning how to be flexible, resilient, and ready to try again. God is molding us into the people he desires for us to be. And sometimes we get off track and need to reset.

Our priorities get mixed up, our endurance isn’t as strong, we are reminded of our inability to do life apart from him. But he doesn’t call us to just pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and start the race over. He calls us to be picked up by Him, and run the race set before of. So jump back into the game, knowing that you are not doing this alone. And if you feel like you’re doing this alone, maybe you need some community, you can find that right here in Our Bible Study Group. Click the join button (or the first link in the description) to see more information about all the membership perks you can access when you join Our bible Study Group. I’ll see you over there!