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Today on the podcast, we are talking about 4 truths that will help you plan your ideal schedule with God in mind. We focus on why creating our schedules based on a cyclical calendar is important, and then we look at what the Bible teaches us about how we plan out our days.

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S2E15 – What You Need to Know about the Christian Creeds – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

In this episode, we are talking about the high-church confessional documents and why you should engage with them. No matter what denomination you belong to, these confessional texts – like Christian creeds, confessions of faith, catechisms, and liturgies – have been incredibly influential in the history of the Church. We need to wrestle with what they say and determine how it fits in with our own personal statement of faith. Today, we are going to talk about why you should read these texts, and then, turn our focus to the Christian creeds in particular. Read more on the blog: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-christian-creeds/ Get a PDF copy of the Christian Creeds here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.kit.com/d080819cc1 Get the Doctrine and Theology Cheat Sheet Here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/bd897d28d0 Get a list of the names of God here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/43d2d5cf6b Get a copy of our personal statement of faith creation guide here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/we-believe-your-personal-statement-of-faith-workbook-pdf-download/ Get “Building Our Foundations: 10 Week Study” here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/building-our-foundations-11-week-systematic-theology-book-bible-study/ Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Hey everyone. I’m Cayce Fletcher and this is Episode 23 of Season 1 of A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. I’m so glad that you are joining me today. We are right in the middle of our series on getting things done from a biblical perspective. Today, we are going to be talking about the last topic in this series: Our Schedules.

If you have been enjoying listening to the podcast, please leave a rating and review to help others find the show. While you’re there, be sure to like or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Don’t forget to check out the blog for other posts and resources. There is a “Creating Your Ideal Schedule” Resource linked to this episode that you can find on my shop at https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/amblshop/. Now onto the episode.

Changing of the Seasons

Earlier this week, I was on a walk with my son through the woods surrounding my house. We crunched through the leaves as I looked up and tried to tell him about all the things he was seeing. As you can imagine, the three-year-old’s questions were endless: Why are the leaves falling? Because it’s winter time and it’s cold outside. Why is it cold? Well, in winter it’s cold because we get less sun. Why don’t we get snow? We don’t live where it snows. It snows up north where your cousins live. Why do they get snow up North? Well, they are even further away from the sun. When will we get snow? Maybe this year, or maybe we will have to drive and see some.

We take the wonder of the changing seasons for granted when we’ve lived through them year after year, but for my son, this was all new. The leaves had dropped, and the world had changed for him. As I explained what was happening, I kept coming back to this central truth: Well, things have changed right now, but soon it will circle back around to summer. We’ll swim and go to the beach. And, it will be hot again to play outside all day.

Seasons are one example of the way that we live through a cyclical calendar, every year repeating the same things again and again. These repetitions can just grow to be monotonous and kind of fade into the background of our lives, or they can point us to central truths about who God is.

We are going to be thinking today about the nature of our schedules and the truths they can teach us about God and ourselves. And, we are going to be thinking about what these truths practically mean for how we schedule our days and our lives.

Bringing it all together: Creating an Ideal Schedule for Your Life

Throughout this series, we’ve dived deep into goal-setting and project planning. We discussed habits, projects, and our wildest dreams. In the last podcast, we focused on creating a system that captures all of the tasks we need to accomplish and ultimately get those tasks done.

The last step in that process was to create space in your schedule to accomplish the tasks that you are able to by matchmaking a task with your available time and current ability. Discussing this gets at one of the last pieces in our discussion on goal setting. When we talk about planning, we can’t avoid talking about our schedules. One of our guiding verses in this series has been Ps. 90:12 which says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

How we spend our days is vitally important. We want to spend them seeking God’s kingdom first, glorifying him with our lives. However, we often spend them just going through the motions.

Setting goals and developing a theme of the year is a good first step in being intentional with how you spend your days. When you do this, you are basically saying that you are accepting responsibility for how your days will go. For how you spend your time.

Goal setting helps to determine the ideal schedule of your days.

As I’ve mentioned before in this series, this is important no matter how much ‘free time’ you have. All of us should want to be intentional about how we spend our time. If we are working full time, those few hours off are precious and we want to use them wisely to help further God’s kingdom. If you have ample self-directed time, we want to be intentional to not waste time. We want to direct our days toward furthering God’s kingdom.

Our time is one of our most valuable resources, so we need to steward it just as we would steward other resources.

When we think about our ideal schedule, we have to think of them in terms of stewardship. We have to ask ourselves how we are spending our days, and then discern if we are wisely spending them in ways that help us reach our goals.

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Take a Time Inventory

Before we start to consider our ideal schedules, the first thing we need to do is consider our current schedules, routines, and habits. The best way to do this is to look at a typical week in your life and monitor how you are spending your time. There are a few different ways to do a time inventory like this.

When do you document your activities? You can simply write it down at the end of the week, doing your best to remember. You can journal about it each night. Or, you can set a reminder to write down every waking hour what you are doing on the hour. Taking a time inventory throughout your days will give you the most accurate information, but obviously will require more effort from you.

I would definitely recommend keeping an inventory for at least a week to help give you a good picture of how you are spending your time. You’ll want to pick a usual week to give the most accurate idea of how you are spending your time. If it’s during the holidays, have lots of work commitments, or you have company coming down, you may want to wait until that’s over before starting your time inventory.

What do you write down? Simply document what you did that day, along with how long you did that activity. It can be helpful to use a planner-style time inventory with a weekly layout. Then, you can just color in the activities on the weekly layout.

Why do you document them? Writing down your activities throughout the week can clue you into your normal routines and habits. Even if you feel like you don’t have any regular routines, you’ll find that you probably have quite a few habits in your life. Some may be life-giving and some may be soul-draining. This can give you an idea of white space in your schedule (or lack thereof) and some areas where you may be ‘wasting time.’

Analyzing your time inventory. Once you take a time inventory, you need to analyze it. Look at patterns in your schedule or ways that you could redeem your time. You can also tally up how much time you spend on certain activities. This can be very helpful with screen time, but you can also tally up the amount of time you spend on reading, cleaning, seeing friends, or spending time with family. You may want to spend more on some areas of your life where you find you are spending less time. Or, vice versa.

Our Schedules are How We Spend Our Days and Steward Our Lives

Our schedules are basically like our budgets. They represent an ideal version of how we spend our most finite resource: time. With wise schedules, we steward our lives well, just like with wise budgets, we steward our finances well.

But, how can we know what to spend our time on? How can we create an ideal schedule?

As with most things in life, we have to strive for balance, grace, and trust as we create our schedules. Without a schedule, there is a lack of vision and our days can be spent foolishly. Time can feel like sand falling through the cracks of our fingers and wisping away. However, with a schedule, we can all too often feel like we have too much control over our lives. We can actually try to wrest control from God, while not allowing for God’s leading in our lives. We are not the Lord of our own lives, and so we have to rely on God’s leading for the way we spend our days. “A man plans his days, but the Lord determines his steps.” (Prov. 16:9).

Our Days, Weeks, Years, and Lives are Cyclical

In our podcast on traditions, we discussed how our years are cyclical. The cyclical nature of our lives is a pattern that I firmly believe God has created us to honor. We are created for the cycle of the sun rising and setting. The seasons of death and rebirth. Of youth and growing old. When we honor the cyclical nature of our days, we never fall into the drudgery and monotony of modern life where everything is constantly the same light, temperature, and consistency. There is constant change and growth, but we learn what to expect as the years go on and grow to yearn for it and long for the comfort of the cycle.

If Christmas or Fall was a constant throughout the year, the shine of these times would begin to wane. The specialness is just because they are fleeting. This truth is seen in so many different areas of our lives that are just here for a season. Sweet Newborn days, fun toddler joy, the passionate days of youth – they are just here for a season. If we always had to deal with a toddler for the rest of our lives, it would be difficult. But, because we recognize the short amount of time we have with them, we treasure these days.

This cyclical nature is seen in basically all facets of the progression of time, and the cyclical nature is repeated in the same way.

In our days: Night – Morning – Noon – Evening
In our weeks: Sabbath – Mondays – Wednesdays – Fridays
In the seasons: Winter – Spring – Summer – Fall
In our church calendar: Advent – Lent – Easter – Ordinary Time
In our lives: Babyhood – Childhood – Adult – Old age

This doesn’t include all the other areas where this pattern can be seen. In all of these areas, there’s this repetition that mimics each other. It starts with a period of rest and quietness. Then, there is a period of rebirth and awakening. There is a time following that of work and ministry and productive time. Followed, by a time that is characterized by a slowing down and a return to rest.

Modernity has sold us the lie that every day is the same, every season is the same, and every age is the same. (Along with saying just about everything else is the same.) This has done us a disservice by not allowing for the necessary shift and change in our productivity level. The Bible actually commands for this rest, in the commandment of the Sabbath, feasts, sabbath year, and jubilee year. In Israel’s rebellious years, one of the judgments that God passed on them was that they refused to honor the Sabbath.

It seems strange that there would need to be a command to honor a time for rest and celebration. Can you imagine someone disobeying a command to celebrate Christmas or a birthday? But, we can see how often people do this during modern times by honoring the Sabbath now – or even holidays. Every day is an opportunity to get ahead, to get more work done, or to veg out with ‘much-needed alone time’ (aka technology overload time). In doing this, we treat every day the same, not allowing for the rhythms of feasting and fasting, rest and work. If every day is the same, there begins to be a dullness about them. We don’t recognize the specialness of traditions and their ability to help us remember the story of our lives and connect with the sacredness of life.

We are meant to experience the full spectrum of human experience, not live in a climate-controlled box where every moment and every day is the same.

Our ideal schedule needs to honor this.

We shouldn’t act like every day will be the same, even if we do try to brainstorm an ideal schedule. Instead, we should consider the rhythms I mentioned before and consider how we can incorporate them into our lives. We need space in our schedules for all of these facets of humanity.

What should our ideal schedules include?

When we create our ideal schedule, there are a few important things that we need to remember:

We work out of rest.

As I mentioned before, the Sabbath is incredibly important. We’ll talk about the sabbath and rest in depth in a future episode. But, as we think about your schedules, it’s important to look at how this works. In The Tech-Wise Family, Andy Crouch discusses the Hebraic idea of the sabbath and rest. We often think that we work and then crash after working. That we must work to ‘earn’ our rest. That rest comes only after working. We wake up to start our day and our work comes first. We are able to rest only after all of our work is done for the day. Our week starts generally on Monday, with our rest only coming with the weekend at the end of the week. Our idea of vacation time mimics this, with some companies saying that you earn half a day of vacation for every 90 days of working or something like that. A simple way to put this is we rest out of work.

However, the Hebraic idea of the sabbath is that rest comes before work. We rest and then out of our rest, we are able to work. In the Hebrew idea of the day, the day starts at sundown. Rest and sleep are the first things that you do in the day. The week begins with the Sabbath, a time of rest. The Jewish feasts are also linked up with the calendar and they are honored with a time of sabbath rest.

We have to change the way we conceptualize work and rest so that it lines up with a more biblical idea. Instead of rest and sleep being something that we begrudgingly do, we recognize that it is a part of the day that honors God, is commanded by God, and should actually be one of our first priorities. Rest should be at the beginning of our day consequently and we need to schedule time for it.

In saying all of this, we have to define what I mean by rest. I’m not talking about selfish forms of rest that prioritize the self above all else. In many ways, rest really just means means sleep. But, rest can also be forms of soul care that we talked about in episode 21. We need balance in our lives which means we also need to have work. We are not resting all the time, we are just creating space for it in our ideal schedule. Balance is key.

Our ideal schedule should be in line with the sun, sabbath, and seasons.

In keeping with this, you should think about your ideal schedule you should plan with this idea of a cyclical calendar that works out of rest. When I brainstormed my ideal schedule, I actually used circles to demonstrate what my day, week, and year would look like instead of just a vertical day. Then I made sure to add rest times to it. If you are interested in this, you can check out the shop to get your own printable copy of my ideal schedule planner.

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Some other points you can think about are the position of the sun and the seasons. During cold, wintry months, incorporate more time for rest, being at home, and being inside. During hot, summertime months, plan activities to soak up the sunshine, travel, and be outside. This point may seem self-evident, but we easily can get into ruts where we act like every month should have the same activities. For some of us that can mean cranking up the AC in the middle of summer to hang out inside with a huge sweatshirt. In effect, we try to act like it’s December in July. For others, it can mean feeling deep discontent in the winter because we hate the cold and wish we could be outside. By honoring the seasons in our schedule, we stop trying to fight against natural patterns and instead lean into them to plan our days.

We stop relying on technology to smooth away the differences between day and night, summer and winter, and instead honor and celebrate what God has done and the patterns that he made.

I don’t think that we truly think about what it means to constantly be in a climate-controlled space and never deal with the elements. In a very real sense, this practice can make us soft and unable to be outside often through all seasons because we don’t like to feel uncomfortable. If we are always at the same temperature, it doesn’t take much to make us feel uncomfortable. Some people are starting to recognize the effects of this on our bodies. Cold Exposure Therapy is one practice that has come up in recent years. In several studies, exposure to cold temperatures can reduce inflammation in your body (and it makes it easier to deal with cold weather).

This is true as well for recognizing the difference between night and day. Instead of trying to force the day into night or vice versa, we honor the difference between the two and sleep when it’s dark and work when it’s light. It’s become really popular in the past few years to talk about the effects of technology and blue light on your circadian rhythm, but we can go further than just thinking about screens when we talk about the effect of light on our bodies. I’ve even heard of some trying to incorporate the difference in how sunlight works in winter versus summer. I never recognized this change when I was working under the harsh fluorescent lights of public school. In summer months, the sun is up early and shoots down lots of blue light. It wakes us up, bold and bright, and stays out till late in the night. But, in the winter months, the sun takes its time to peek out over the horizon. It’s cooler and softer. The person I was listening to actually tried to mimic this in their homes by using candles in the morning instead of overhead lights, to try to bring some of that soft light into the house.

I do try to mimic some of this in my home with how I use light. In the morning I only turn on a lamp. During midday, most of the lights in my house are on. In the evening, I start to shut off the lights again until it’s only my lamp that is on. Being outside often throughout the day is another great way to line up your circadian rhythm as well.

These practices just require mindfulness and a little bit of self-control. It goes against the press of modernity, but it can lead to more mindfulness and a host of health benefits. When we strive to create our ideal schedules, we look towards a rhythm of balance.

Our ideal schedule and routines should incorporate balance.

As you start to brainstorm your ideal schedule, you can start to add in a more balanced approach to living. If you completed the time inventory, you may have recognized some places where you were out of balance. Maybe you haven’t been spending much quiet time with God. Maybe you’ve been working overtime and haven’t sat down for a meal with your family in a while. Maybe you’ve been racing your kids from activity to activity, but you haven’t had a real heart-to-heart conversation with a friend in weeks.

This is where an ideal schedule can help. It is not a legalistic command for your life; it is a blueprint to help you know when you are getting off track. So, when you begin to map out a schedule, think about what habits and routines you would like to incorporate into your life with an aim to have a balanced schedule. This is not the time to try to manipulate your schedule to get more done. This is the time to consider if you are spending enough time resting and working, alone and with people, feasting and fasting. Justin Whitmel Earley has two great books, The Common Rule and Habits of the Household, that can help give you ideas of which habits to include in your life.

A couple of habits that he includes in his daily and weekly schedule are:

3 daily prayers
A daily meal with someone
An hour of screen-free time a day and one weekly day of no-screens
A weekly conversation with a friend
A weekly day of fasting
A weekly sabbath

We should incorporate the church liturgical year into our ideal schedule.

I’ve always struggled with incorporating times of fasting, self-control, and waiting in my schedule. Feasting and celebration are easy to celebrate, but telling myself no, sacrificing, and giving up things doesn’t seem as fun. This is where observing the church calendar comes in. Through the church calendar, there are weeks of celebration and weeks of fasting. The balance we are looking for is incorporated into the calendar year while also offering opportunities to preach the gospel to ourselves and others while being reminded of Jesus’ life.

By incorporating the balance seen in the church liturgical year, we can get closer to our ideal schedule.

Later this week, I’m going to do a post on the blog that describes the church liturgical year and point you to some people who recognize the liturgical year as protestants. If you’re interested, I encourage you to subscribe to the blog so you can get that post and my latest content sent straight to your inbox.

So what do you think? How do you normally schedule your days? What are some guidelines that you have? You can comment below or send me an email at caycefletcher@amorebeautifullifecollective.com. I hope you join me next week for how we create our ideal schedules using what we’ve talked about in this episode. Until then, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.

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