175 - Integrated Living
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Show Notes:
A few years ago, I came up with a core purpose statement for my work and this podcast, and that is: Practical tools for an integrated life. That is what I'm after. I want my teachings, my content, everything that I give to you or anyone who's listening to be very practical, and I want them to be implemented into an integrated life.
But first you have to answer the question: What is an integrated life? What does that even mean? Well, the word integrate means to combine one thing with another so that they become a whole. Another definition of integrated is with various parts or aspects linked or coordinated. Living an integrated life means combining your faith life, your home life, and your work life so that they become linked or coordinated, complimenting each other beautifully and ultimately providing the train tracks for a healthy soul and a fulfilling life. And I'm gonna challenge you today, in your faith and your home and in your work—to live an integrated life.
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So, if integrating your life means combining your faith and your home and your work so they become linked or coordinated, the the question that follows that is:
What does that really look like?
What does that look like for you and me as we live out our days? Well, when you're grounded in your walk with Jesus and you're thriving in your home and your marriage and your family and you're glorifying the Lord in your wise, diligent hard work—you're living an integrated life and it's gonna look different in a lot of different seasons of life. But I think it's most important that you simply acknowledge that our faith and our home and our work are not separate silos operating independently from one another, but rather they're all different areas of our lives that should complement each other and actually flourish when they do and help the other areas of our lives also flourish, if that makes sense.
So I wanna challenge you in a couple of specific ways today, just wherever you are in your life, wherever you are, as you're wrapping up this year, I want you to ask yourself—
What does integrated living look like for me in this season of my life?
And I want you to also keep in mind that same question for the year to come. What does this look like for me in the next year? Do I need to spend more time making sure that my faith life is in a healthy place and my walk with God is good and right and true?
Do I need to ramp up and launch some more things in work? Or do I need to tone work down a bit? What does the season of your family look like right now? Is it taking up a lot of your capacity and time? And rightfully so, because your kids are little, or maybe they're teenagers and they have a demanding sports schedule or whatever it is.
What is your season of life look like in your home? And how can you best serve your family right now? Just think about these things as I kind of challenge you and ask you some questions. Okay?
So the first area I wanna challenge you and encourage you in is your faith. If I was getting coffee with you right now and sitting down across the table from you and I could look you in the eye, I would simply ask you this, how are you doing? In your heart, in your spirit, and in your walk with the Lord? I encourage you just to assess how you're doing with God. How is your relationship with him? It all starts here. Everything starts with our walk with the Lord. If we are a believer, everything in our lives stem from this. Our work should be motivated by our relationship with God. Our family should be grounded in our relationship with God. And the most important thing here is for you to be honest, to be so honest with yourself because the Lord already knows, but it's healthy and good to just pause and say, how am I doing? How is my walk with the Lord? Is there anything in my life that's hindering me from walking closer to Him?
It's also important to remember as believers, we need to be doing this every day. This isn't something that we do once a year or once every few years. This is daily when we wake up. We need to make sure we are right with the Lord. We need to repent and ask His forgiveness for things. And we need to ask the Holy Spirit to fill us again and again and again every day. Yes, He's living inside us. Yes, we already have Him with us, but we want His power. We want His life. We want His leadership and His guidance and His wisdom every day because the Word tells us His mercies are new every morning and wisdom comes from Him.
He's the creator of everything. So if we need wisdom, of course He's the person to ask. But there's fresh wisdom and fresh things for us to get from Him every day for this season of your life. And that brings me to your next question: What season are you in?
So after you've assessed kind of how you're doing with God, just kind of stop and look around in your life and answer the question, what season are you in? And in this season, what's the best way that you can connect with the Lord? Before I had kids, I would wake up early and have a long quiet time every single morning and I would journal and I would read my Bible and I would have study time and I would be memorizing scripture. And as I've had kids, the seasons have changed. They've ebbed and flowed. But you know, with like a newborn baby or those long weeks where babies are teething and you're not getting a lot of sleep, waking up early isn't exactly part of like a normal daily routine that you can do. And so in those seasons, I would focus on playing worship music every afternoon. I would choose one verse to meditate on all throughout the week because my brain space was even limited. And I would just say, Lord, speak to me through this one verse.
What season are you in? Like what are the ways that you best connect with the Lord right now?
And the third question for your faith is, how are you constantly returning to Him and returning to the rhythms of life that will reconnect you with Him?
Do you have routines or patterns or rhythms that you have in place daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly that you put in place even in your calendar that will reorient your heart back to him? Another name for this is establishing your Rule of Life, setting in place simple rhythms, whether it's prayers, whether it's a song of worship, whether it's stepping outside and taking a few deep breaths and asking the Lord, just inviting him into your day. The practice of the Sabbath or times of solitude. Whatever it is, you establish rhythms and routines that reorient your heart back to God because that's just what we need as humans. We need to constantly be returning to truth and reminding ourselves of truth because we're a forgetful people. So that's my encouragement to you today:
Assess how you're doing with God.
Ask what season are you in right now. What ways best connect you with the Lord in this season?
And ask what your rule of life looks like. Do you have rhythms or routines in place to reorient yourself back to him again and again?
Okay, now let's talk about your home. Ephesians 3:14-16 says,
“For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I ask that out of the riches of His glory, He may strengthen you with power through His spirit and your inner being.”
Have you ever taken time to think about how unique your family is? I love that verse. It says, every family is named by the Lord in heaven. How God brought every unique personality in person and boy and girl into your family for a purpose. And he hand chose each of you to be together, to grow together, to do life together, to rely on one another through the celebrations and difficulties of life.
I saw a friend post something on Instagram recently and she said, I'm so grateful for all the chances to travel and see the beauty of God's creation. But I'm still convinced that the most beautiful thing God has created is family.
What a gift it is to be part of our families and to help lead and guide our families. Your family has its own unique culture, its own distinct personalities that's unlike any other. And whether or not you realize that, your family already has its own culture, its own values, but you also have the opportunity to shape that culture and those values intentionally with a little bit of time, thought, input, and even some fun family nights together.
Because here's the thing, culture is gonna happen one way or another, but when you stop and you put it into writing, you put your family's culture and beliefs and values and mission into writing, you step into the authority that you have been given to guide and lead and direct your family down an intentional path instead of one that you may or may not like.
So I'm gonna challenge you today and encourage you today to take some time and write out the most important beliefs that you have as a family and your values. What are the phrases that you want to be repeated in your home again and again? What are the values that you want to raise your children in? And before you start thinking, I don't know, this is way too overwhelming. I don't have time to do this. You know, our family's good. Let me just, let me just encourage you: You don't have to do this to have a great family. I know plenty of families who never write these things down, but I have been so encouraged by the families who do, because they have these clear words to fall back on, they have clear things that are planted in the hearts of their children that when their children go off to college, they can like grab onto or when their children get married, they can remember the things that they've said over and over again through the years. Or when they face a crisis or something hard, they feel grounded because of these lessons that have been repeated through the years or written on the walls of their helm.
And even as a business owner, I can tell you when you repeat, you know, your core purpose or your core values over and over again to your team, it gets the “why” of why we're working, why we're doing this, into our hearts.
And similarly, I think if you were to design a family mission statement, you're answering the question: Who are we and what do we stand for?
So this is my encouragement to to you have a family night. You can make it fun, have everyone come in PJ's, pop popcorn, bake cookies, do something fun, but have like a whiteboard and a permanent marker. And with your marker at the top, just write, this is what our family is about. And then just ask your family, what are some words that best describe us? And then ask them what is most important to us? Then ask, what are our strengths and what sayings best capture our family? And if you do that, you are gonna have core values that you love to stand for and repeat over and over again, phrases that you can come back to as a family. You can even combine all of it into one kind of family mission statement that you write out and hang in your kitchen or hang in the walls of your home that you guys can refer back to. And it is a beautiful thing that unifies you and your culture together. It's a simple thing. Poster board costs like $2, a sharpie costs like three. What a beautiful way to really define who you are as a family and bring your family together for a common purpose.
My final encouragement to you is in your work, whether you are working at home, serving and loving your babies and managing your home, whether you have a side gig, a side dream, a side hustle, an Etsy shop, a small budding photography business, a copywriting business, or if you work full time in a corporate office, nine to five, no matter what your work looks like in your life—I just wanna encourage you, your work is your ministry. And in the kingdom of God, real success doesn't have to do with how much money we make, but real success has to do with the people we impact and how we steward the gifts that we have been given.
It has to do with the difference you're making in people's lives. Who do you stop and pray for? Who do you come alongside and support when they are hurting? Who are the souls that have been changed for all of eternity because you are a part of their life?
Now, I'm not saying that money isn't important, it is, but it's just a tool. And when you make a lot of money, you can do a lot of awesome things in the kingdom of God and you can bless a lot of people and you can free a lot of people out of bondage by funding projects like International Justice Mission and and A21 Ministries.
I mean, these things need money to work. And so it's important that we do steward our gifts well, but it's this holistic view of our work being about the kingdom. Success is the difference we're making in people's lives. It's the souls that have been changed. It's how we manage the money and the projects is how we follow the voice of the Holy Spirit as He leads us. It is being excellent for the kingdom of God and making a difference so that people can see that we are different from the rest of the culture.
We are light in darkness. We hold our head high and our shoulders back because we know the God of heaven, Jesus Christ, the one who made everything we see and touch, the one who formed us in His image, the Holy Spirit who gives us power lives in us, gives us wisdom, gives us knowledge, gives us the understanding and the intuitiveness to make new decisions and try new things.
But we know Him, we know the one who created it all and we are inspired by Him and we look to Him and we can live and operate our businesses from a place of peace and wisdom.
And that looks different. It looks different. Our assignments change in different seasons of our life, and that's good and that's how it should be. And as long as we are connected to the Lord and keeping our eyes on Him, we can flow in and out of work in different ways in different capacities knowing that we are doing kingdom work because our work is our ministry.
No matter what season of life we're in, no matter what our work looks like, ministry is all for the Lord. It is for worship for Him. And so I just wanna encourage you to be reminded of that your work matters. Your work isn't just to earn a buck, it's so much more than that. Your work is your ministry.
And so that is what An Integrated Life is about. Actually, these are just a few components of what living an integrated life looks like. But I hope that you're encouraged today to just stop and and think about that and realize, you know what? My faith inspires everything that I do. It touches every area of my life, my home life, my family, my marriage.
That is an anchor for the way that we live, but also it influences other families around us. The way that we create our family's culture. It touches other families around us and our community around us and the way that we engage in our work should reflect the heart of God for others. We should view our work as our ministry. A few years ago I started thinking about this idea of an integrated life and how I really believe a lot of people kind of separate them out and we have things focused on just our faith and we have things or books or you know, whatever resources focused on just our work. And we have resources focused on just our family. But they're all three meant to be combined together, working together. We always have elements of all three in our lives at all time. And what I've found is there are timeless principles and truths found in scripture that I need to return to over and over and over again.
It's not something that you get once and you're good, just like your relationship with Jesus, you have to come back over and over and over again. It's a lifelong thing where we're walking with him and growing and learning, and that's what integrated living looks like. We have to reassess what season we're in. We have to take our authority in Jesus in that season and apply it to our faith life, our home life and our work life. And that realization, the need for returning and the need to integrate our life altogether is what really inspired me to create an integrated life, which is an audio course that you can download to your phone just like this podcast. But it's 18 episodes and there are six episodes for your home, six episodes for your work, six episodes for your faith. Every single episode starts with scripture. It starts with the Bible verse. I talk about the Lord in every single lesson you get a workbook to follow along with so you can assess the season of life you're in.
You can write out your own rule of life and anchor your rhythms for your faith. You get the framework for writing your family's mission statement and core values in a more in depth way. You can establish the rhythms in your work, even how to create a five year, three year, and one year plan, how to set quarterly goals every year, how to create a clear purpose for your work for this season that you are in.
And I created this just before my fourth baby was born about a year and a half ago. And I launched it, then I released it, and then I went and had a baby and just kind of disappeared for a while. And now it's back. It is finally back after a year and a half. It is open to be purchased December 1st through the 10th and the evening of the 10th at 11:59 PM, we're gonna close the doors to integrated life, but if you buy it during that time, you'll get 18 episodes and you can have a private RSS podcast feed so you can download it right to your phone, have it forever, and listen to it as if it were its own podcast. And my hope in my heart in recording these episodes are these lessons, is that it would be something you can listen to year after year after year. It would be timeless truths that you can apply to different seasons of your life to really get the most out of your faith and your home and your work, and have them all work together and compliment one another so that you can live from this framework of having a healthy soul and a fulfilling life. You can head to nancyray.com/integratedlife to learn more about it. Make sure you grab yours before December 10th. And I'm just gonna say, I don't know if I'm gonna re-release this the same way I'm thinking about redoing this course in a way that might serve families more, that might serve entrepreneurs more, maybe splitting it apart. I might, I don't know. If you buy it, I'm hopefully gonna get feedback from you and I'm gonna get a handful of people to help me create it or maybe recreate it or maybe it'll stay how it is if everybody loves it exactly how it is in the new year.
I don't know what's gonna happen yet. I'm still kind of working through that. But I do wanna let you know it is available December 1st through the 10th. You have a few more days to grab yours in this format and I hope that you do, and I really hope it blesses you.
Sally Clarkson said,
“There is no single way to serve God. But the point is this, we each have only one life to live, to tell a story about him, about his ways, about his love. And if we are Christ followers, then God calls us to use our gifts to exercise our faith and to become salt and light right for where we're at.”
Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.
