Stress

There are periods of my life where I just feel really stressed and overwhelmed by things, for some reason this week was one of them. I think about it, and I feel like I lay it all on myself and I'm too hard on myself that it makes it hard to handle. But at the same time, it's so meaningless because there's no need to be stressed at all because I know that my life is not my own and I'm not in control. But it's interesting because the pattern seems to be that when I get to these times, I'm forced to rely on God even more so than I usually do and all of a sudden, God does something miraculous and I get knocked off my get about how amazing he is. 

My commute

In a normal week, the typical time I set aside for bible reading and prayer is during my commute back and forth from the city. Although not an ideal spot to spend my alone times with God, but that's when I have my me myself and I time. Over the weekend, I took a day off work to go to six flags. I had a great time but one thing it did take me off of was my  normal routine. I realize that when I don't read the bible and pray, my day feels different, it feels empty, I feel a little anxious. It's weird, but just like I need  to feed myself with physical food, I need to intentionally feed myself with spiritual food as well. Normally, I always have the other pray for us before we go to sleep every night but the past couple of days, we had been coming home so late at night that it causes us to be too tired to do anything. It makes a difference in how I sleep, how I wake up, everything. 

Also, I have a coworker that often tells me that she wakes up early in the morning to "pray things through". I give her a lot of props for doing that because its very difficult for me to wake myself up at a certain time to do anything. Over the weekend, I sort of felt that way... Where I feel like I needed and wanted to pray things through, I'd feel like something is missing if I didn't and part of me was glad that the weekday was coming again so that I could go back to my normal routine.

A lot of times I feel like my coworker talks too much. Although a very spiritual lady, I'm still fairly new at my job and the learning process slows me down from completing what I'm supposed to on one. Many times, she gets caught up in telling me a story, and those stories are great and all because they're always intended to be an encouraging story, but as a new employee, I'm still learning and I can't pay attention to talking and my work at the same time. Well, although I feel that way every so often, she does speak a lot of truth. Example: I often tell her that my wrist hurts from sitting at the computer too long and I feel like I have carpel tunnel syndrome. She immediately responds, "don't claim it". That's true, why in the world am I claiming pain onto my body. This weekend, I was more intentional about not claiming something like that because it becomes psychosomatic and all in my mind. 

Anyway, every time I have my phone around me, I'll squeeze in looking at instagram or Facebook or the like, not for any particular reason, but just for the sake of scrolling through pictures on social media website. For some reason, I felt like this weekend, I was on social media very often, and it's actually pretty draining and I get just about nothing out of it. I think I'm gonna make a deal with myself to only go on social media once a day. Actually, I'm just tired of looking at my phone and checking it all the time, such a bad habit.

God I commit this day to you, I want to start off my morning by giving it over to you. 

Balancing and Adjusting

From the outside perspective, it seems like I hang out with the others friends much more than mine. As I reflect on who we spend the most time with, it's actually our family members. Both of us seem to have a lot of family members and they take up most of our free days, which essentially is Saturday. We both see our family members very often and I appreciate that we have a good relationship with them. Although it is unfortunate because there are so many friends to catch up with and hang out with, but unfortunately there is only one available day of the week (at least for now because of the school schedule and life adjustments). And on top of that, I love making new friends and sometimes I wonder why I do that because its already hard to maintain relationships with those I already have aside through technology. Still trying to figure out a good balance. 

One major change since being married is the financial factor. Although I try not to make it a stressor in my life because I know that if I'm wise with my finances and if I know that God always provides, I shouldn't be worried, I still do. The biggest thing is just more responsibility and more bills, and now I actually have to be mindful of what we are spending our money on in order to be sure that we will have enough to pay bills and such throughout the month. Since being in the financial peace class, I've been intentionally thinking about budgeting and how to handle my money. It's been quite difficult but it'll take a couple of months to find a balance of what to spend where. The past month, I haven't touched my credit card or my wallet, and the only thing we've really spent money on is our necessary expenses like grocery shopping, travel and bills. It feels good to bring healthy food from home every day and not have to buy city priced food from the deli. The only hard part I'm having trouble budgeting is the "hang out and entertainment" expenses. It seems like there's not much wiggle room to go out to eat at restaurants and such but many times it seems like its inevitable because there's always a persons birthday to go to or a special event to attend. I'm so privileged to have great friends to be able to attend events all the time but I'm still learning a balance. But, I realize that I love eating at home cooked food. 

One thing I love about the other and I is that we can fun without the use of substance. Yesterday we went to a birthday party at a lounge and it was casual and alcohol involved. Watching him dance around, being entertaining and not needing to use alcohol to have fun was a blessing to me. I love that we truly find joy in The Lord and can have fun anytime and everywhere. 

One thing I'm not really looking forward to is this coming Fall semester. I already feel the stress and the pressure of the crazy schedule I'm going to have and the amount of time I'm going to invest at work, internship, school, and that's just the least of it. My work schedule in the summer has been pretty hectic even with just forty hour work weeks. Work is never boring, there's always something to do, there's actually never enough time to finish anything, even working overtime and trying to finish work. I put so much heart into work that after work I become so exhausted.

There are many times recently where I purposely become unproductive after work hours and not want to do anything because I'm just tired and exhausted from a long day. This fairly new job, this new married life, the upcoming internship, the finishing of school, there's so many adjustments and I'm still learning to balance everything.