Does life feel overwhelming? Are you yearning for more beauty in everyday life? Make this year the year where you choose to see the good, true, and beautiful. In this post, I’ll talk about what a year 2025 was, and share one of my goals for 2026: To capture 365 beautiful moments each day. Follow along with me on Instagram and Facebook using the #ambl365challenge.
S3E4 – Clarifying Your Mission: Influence, Ministry, & Your Why – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast
Hey everyone, and welcome back to A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast! I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and I’m so excited to be back with you for Season 3, Episode 5. We’re here to help you grow in grace, live with purpose, and live beautifully.
Our Perception of Time
This has been a year.
This morning, I sat down with my husband and sipped on a cup of coffee before turning to the hustle and bustle of our busy lives. He was talking about the perception of time, how fast or slow it feels. There have been studies done that describe this feeling of shortening or lengthening of time. What makes time feel fast or slow?
Among several factors are these:
- Boredom: Feeling bored lengthens time
- Impulsivity: Those who struggle with delayed gratification have an altered sense of time
- Emotion: Depression and anxiety tend to lengthen the amount of time that we feel
- Craving: If you desire something but can’t have it, time seems to crawl by. On the flip side, caffeine and alcohol can make time seem to go faster.
- Aging: Time speeds up as you get older, potentially due to the familiarity of your life. When we experience something new, time slows down. Time moves quickly when we are trudging along through the mundanity of daily life.
We’ve all had moments where we sit and watch the clock, waiting for it to tick closer to the final thing we desire – whether that’s the ringing of a school bell or the arrival of a friend. Those moments seem to crawl by… and I don’t know if we want our life to feel like that.
But, at the same time, I always have an inner dread of feeling like life is like sand that is passing through my fingers. I don’t want to turn around and look back and think: Where? Where has the time gone? What have I done?
As my husband sipped his coffee, he laughed and said that this year has felt like a month. It has moved so quickly, and there was so much more he wanted to do and accomplish.
I didn’t relate. I felt like I had lived 5 lifetimes since New Year’s 2025.
This year has put me through the fire.
It has refined me.
It has made me weary, and it has also made me stronger.
A year of painful growth.
There’s always something about the New Year that makes us want to turn and reflect. We ask: Have I spent my time well these past 12 months? We should hold ourselves accountable for the answer to that question.
I have had a tumultuous year, full of difficult situations.
A Fitful Start
My daughter, who is now a walking, smiling, bright-eyed little toddler, was born in December. The first few weeks were great. With your third, you begin to trust that you know a little bit about this new parent thing. But, right around the middle of January, something went sideways.
No matter how much she nursed, she never seemed happy. Witching hour turned into 4 or 5, as I rocked and nursed her into the night. She seemed wan, and her clothes just seemed to swallow her whole.
By her next doctor’s appointment, which she screamed in her car seat all the way to, her growth percentile had dropped. She was diagnosed with Failure to Thrive. It was frustrating. I had successfully exclusively nursed two babies already. Shouldn’t I have this figured out? But, instead, I had to begin exclusively pumping because she had basically stopped latching.
Those months were difficult – and props to all those moms who exclusively pump. It is not for the weak!
Finally, by the summer, she began to nurse more easily, and with the help of pumping and a little formula, she was back on track.
Crawling Up the Mountain
During the same time as I was trying to soothe my daughter and get my supply up, I had another difficult situation (that almost felt like an inconsolable baby). My husband and I were starting a new business. He had worked in construction, renovating and flipping our house, and then he had been building a house for a family member. In the Spring, we were focusing our efforts on his shop and building that business.
Entrepreneurship is not for the weak. It is a leap of faith that is truly a serious gamble. You invest blood, sweat, tears, and a whole lot of money and time as a bet on yourself to pull through and make something that is life-sustaining for not only you but also your generations to come. That is a lofty goal.
But, unless you’ve been there, you don’t realize that the stories you hear never really focus on the difficulty of the building stage. You hear people talk about how they fail ten times before finally making it big and making a million dollars. In those stories, you focus on the payout, the reward. But what really matters is the sacrifice. What that person had to do to make the business work.
Sally Clarkson, someone I admire and have mentioned before on the blog, talks about a period of life when she was a young mother and beginning her ministry. They lived in Texas and went without a salary for four years before the ministry could sustain them. Now she has a podcast that reaches millions of people and a ministry with a sizable staff.
Again, I may say this, and you hear the reward that she reaps at 70 for a lifetime of work. But, truly, after living through this year, the sacrifice of what she did is a notable thing. She was willing to give up so much so that she could bring her dream to reality – and has truly done God’s kingdom work with her life.
There have been many a moment this year when I felt defeated. Anxious. Almost distraught.
But I have learned through this difficult time the power of prayer. And, I know what it means to say, “Give me my daily bread” for “consider the birds of the air they neither sow nor reap but the our heavenly Father feeds them.” How much more will he take care of me?
Related: 5 Ways to Create a Life You Love Today
Watching the Finish of the Race
At the beginning of summer, my father and mother-in-law moved from out of state into our basement while their house was being finished. My father-in-law was diagnosed in the year prior with terminal cancer that has reappeared right before Christmas. He was a pastor, a man who desired God. He wanted to know him and live for him.
It was hard. To watch him suffer and grieve the life that he was losing. And to watch all those who loved him grieve the man who had meant so much.
There is a Latin phrase, Memento Mori, that means ‘Remember you must die.’ (White Horse Inn did an excellent series on this and the biblical theology of death.) Far from being morbid, I think this is a crucial practice towards fighting against the fleetingness of life. One of my favorite verses is Psalm 90:12, “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
I couldn’t help but think about my father-in-law’s legacy and what he had built with his life. At his funeral, when he passed in November, they talked about his many books, ties, and inherited baseball cards. We all accumulate things and stories, and characteristics that become the signifying thing that makes up our lives.
But of course, his legacy was not his books or ties or baseball cards. Those things were passed down or boxed up and given away. His legacy was his impact on other people, both through his large family (of 11 children!) and his work as a pastor, chaplain, and through our church’s conference.
He had the gift of some extra time with family and friends, but no amount of time is ever enough.
Seasons Come and Seasons Go
I remember talking to someone about some of these obstacles and feeling a little overwhelmed. There was so much going on, and truly, even this doesn’t sum up the difficulties of my life. There were still the difficulties of having three kids, 5 and under, homeschooling, blogging, working in ministry, and trying to keep some friendships alive.
He told me that this time was just a season.
And I said back, I sure hope so.
We all undergo difficult times where the weight of the world seems to break us. These times can draw us closer to God, where we say as Job did, “I heard about you, but now I know you.” But all too often, we allow the brokenness to set in and turn into bitterness. We do not turn towards God. We grow callous towards him and angry with our circumstances.
Over the summer, I saw a job opening for a homeschool curriculum company based in my area. It seemed perfect. It was a remote, ELA position. I could work, help my family financially, and still stay home. I made it past the first two rounds, and I thought, ‘This! This is how God is going to answer my prayers.’ But then, silence. After a few weeks, I stopped hoping, and then two months later, they finally sent the reply that they had gone with someone else.
Truly, I felt so sad. This could have been an answer to so many problems. I thought it was a perfect way for God to ‘show up and show out.’ And it felt like cold water thrown on my face. As I tossed and turned at night with worry, the verse, “He gives sleep to the one he loves,” rolled around in my mind. I thought, God, do you not love me? Why does it seem like you don’t hear me?
But he was listening.
At the same time that I was waiting for a response back from this job, someone had reached out to my husband with steady work that would jumpstart the business that we were building. It was an exact answer to a previous prayer I had been praying.
That’s the thing: We have to be looking for God working in our lives. We are all too often like my son, whose eyes are bigger than his stomach. It doesn’t matter what he has; he looks and thinks that what someone else has is much better.
We see what someone else has, and are minds stop focusing on our own lives and start desiring someone else’s. We think God should be moving in our lives in the exact same way as he moves in someone else’s.
This just results in discontentment. Instead of being filled with gratitude for the grace we have received, we react in bitterness and entitlement for everything we didn’t get.
Related: 3 Ways to Cultivate Gratitude Today
Moving Forward in Gratitude
In my post on Why Gratitude Should Be One of our Primary Goals, I talked about why gratitude is so beneficial for our everyday lives. Gratitude helps us to fight against envy and discontentment while focusing on the joy that comes from the Lord.
2025 was a heck of a year. It was hard. Trying. Difficult.
But 2026 can be different.
So this year, I am choosing gratitude. I am choosing joy. I am choosing beauty.
And, you can join me too.
The #ambl365challenge
For all of 2026, I am challenging myself to find at least one beautiful moment each day to capture with a picture. I find that focusing our gaze on the good, true, and beautiful can help our hearts to cultivate more of what is good, true, and beautiful. My hope is that through documenting these moments, I can choose gratitude and joy more than bitterness and discontentment.
Here’s how you can join me:
- Capture a real-life moment where you are seeing the beauty in everyday life
- Write a caption (no AI) that talks about what God is teaching you in that moment
- Post (however often you choose) on your favorite social media with the hashtag #ambl365challenge
Join me on Instagram to follow the journey towards a more beautiful life!
Life is hard, but we can choose joy. Here’s to creating a more beautiful life together.
Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts! How are you creating a more beautiful life this year?
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Until next time, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.
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