Stress has a way of piling up in a woman’s life until she is unable to make quality decisions, enter into meaningful conversation, or enjoy what she has been given. You were not created to be an anxious woman whose life is being frittered away at the altar of busyness. You are a woman of significance, created for joy, peace, and eternal impact!
Whitaker House
Day 1
Scriptures: Daniel 7:25, John 15:4
Spinning Plates
Women of the twenty-first century are expected to spin a multitude of plates, and as a result, they are stressed-out, worn down, overcommitted, and understaffed! According to a Barna study, 72 percent of all women feel overwhelmed by stress, and for women who still have children at home, this rate increases to 80 percent. In addition to the perpetual spinning of precious plates, there is the enormous challenge of determining how much time and energy should be given to each area of life.
Stress has a way of piling up in a woman’s life until she is unable to make quality decisions, enter into meaningful conversation, or enjoy the life that she has been given.
We have an enemy who wants to take advantage of our vulnerabilities. The goal of our spiritual foe is to cause us to be in a state of exhaustion and weariness every day of our lives. The enemy knows that if he can keep us distracted by stress, he can steal the “abundant” right out of our life. Stress will rob us of our joy, dismantle our peace, and deny us hope. Stress doesn’t have the power to change tomorrow, but it surely does mess up today!
The devil is an expert in trickery and distraction. He does not normally tempt you with obvious compromise, but his beguiling strategy is to offer things that seem good. Satan will use something that momentarily appears good to call you away from God’s eternal best for your life.
You were not created to be an anxious woman whose life is being frittered away at the altar of busyness. You were created for joy, peace, and eternal impact, not temporary distractions. Perhaps it is time for you to make some much-needed changes in your life.
God has an antidote for weariness. He has prescribed the secret of “abiding” in Him to heal your tired and exhausted soul. The spiritual opposite of weariness and stress may be described as the restorative simplicity of abiding in Christ. Strength always comes from rest—never from needless, perpetual activity.
When your permanent residence is the presence of Christ, and when you allow Him to whisper in your ear His wonderful plan for each day and each hour, and even the specific moments of your day, then His glorious fruit will be beautifully and deliciously apparent in your well-watered life. We must find quiet moments in our loud lives to begin to hear the still, small voice of the Father.
Day 2
Scripture: Psalms 61:1-4
When You Feel Overwhelmed
Does your heart ever feel overwhelmed? Honestly, there are days in my life when my heart vacillates between being raw with paralyzing frustration and being stimulated by a thousand agitations. Continuously, the floods of demands, disciplines, people, chores, habits, vices, and commitments create a massive quagmire in my life that can only be described by one desperate word: overwhelming.
When we are overwhelmed, the first thing we need to do is cry out to God. We need prayer more than we need our circumstances to change. Just going to my infinitely gracious God, who is lovingly attentive in all of His ways, reminds me that I am not in charge. There is Someone mightier and more powerful than I who is well able to bring relief to my mountain of stress.
One of the most destructive mistakes that any of us makes during moments of overwhelming madness is to be led by our emotions. Anger and impatience will do damage to relationships that may be difficult to repair.
When you are feeling overwhelmed, do not focus on what is causing the irritation or annoyance. Turn your eyes away from your circumstances. Instead, set your gaze—and your mind—on the only One who is able to help you!
There is no safer, more peaceful place to be than to abide in God and with God. When I linger in His presence and enjoy the safety of His Word, it is then that the overwhelming things of this earth truly “grow strangely dim.” When His nearness overshadows all that screeches my name, I am at peace at last. The life that He bestows to a desperate woman such as I is the life that I have dreamed about and longed for.
God’s presence miraculously enables me to face another day of the demanding details of daily living. His Word powerfully shields and protects me from the rapid-fire of life’s stresses. Prayer helps me to wisely focus on what is eternal and not on what merely stirs up a ruckus.
Perhaps, the next time that you or I find ourselves in overwhelming circumstances, what we should do is run to God and all that He is! I resolve to take a break from this mad, mad, mad, mad world and set my heart where it has always belonged…in Him.
Day 3
Scriptures: Proverbs 27:1, Psalms 71:8
Be Captivated by the Wonder of Today
Have you noticed that most women are always in a hurry? We hurry to potty train our children, and then hurry them off to preschool so we can have more leisure time. And yet, when they finally leave home, we long for the days when they used to put their little arms around our necks. Then, we wish we hadn’t hurried through those years.
Or, we hurry through the grocery store in the afternoon because we still have to make it to the drugstore, the gym, and the dry cleaner’s before 5:00 p.m. Yet, in our haste to check things off our to-do list, we miss the elderly man in the produce department who needs a word of encouragement, and we never even think to help the young mom in the checkout line with three young children and a cartload of groceries.
Hurry has become our addictive pattern in life.
The extravagant and undeniable truth is this: today is the very best day of your life! There is no fuller or grander gift than the undeserved endowment of the present. Today is the moment of miracles. The present holds the certainty of great richness and the assuredness of an existence that is too good to be true! Fall in love with being alive today!
As a significant woman, made in the image of God, I am able to choose how much splendor I will squeeze out of today. Will I slog through uncommon minutes and look dull-eyed at all that I have been given? Or, will I embrace the ordinary miracles that reveal their lovely heads in every waking moment?
If our focus is fixed on the remote possibilities of tomorrow, we will never be captivated by the wonder of now! We must keep in mind that stress and its accomplice, weariness, are unseen thieves that will embezzle the joy and peace right out of a wonderful day!
Women in every season of life must always remember that the choices they make now determine the joy and love they will experience in all of their tomorrows. The investment of wholehearted engagement in the present will assuredly bring a wealth of resources tomorrow. However, the focus must be on living well today.
Whenever I am fighting off the monster of stress, I have found it invigorating to keep the following declarations close at hand. I choose to lay aside my to-do list and take the time to remind myself—out loud—of the priorities that are most important for me:
“Today, I will make myself at home in the pleasure of this day and find the fingerprint of God in every moment. I will listen for His heartbeat and the song of life that comes only from heaven.”
“Today, I will connect myself to the present…and be captivated by the gift of today!”
Day 4
Scriptures: Psalms 119:109, 2 Corinthians 12:9, Philippians 4:13
A Mystery and a Miracle
Stress happens when we carry more than God has called us to bear, and when we do more than He has called us to do. Stress is a warning signal that something in our life needs to change. Stress can also be the result of committing to the wrong things rather than the right things.
I have always believed that my life was in God’s hands—and it is. He is sovereign, and He is most assuredly the God of all authority. Yet He has also given us free will to choose Him or not—to choose well or not. He has given us the power to determine what level of stress we have in our lives. He always offers peace and rest to His children, even in the midst of chaos and busy living. I know that peace and rest are His will for my life. However, I have the option to choose Him or not, and in that respect, my life is in my own hands.
There will be seasons in life when you will have to learn how to rest, but not quit. Only a woman whose heart is centered on eternity will be able to navigate busyness while continuing to keep a calm heart, a peaceful countenance, and a gracious voice. In the most pressured and overloaded times of life, your faith will guide you, keep you, and control you.
You are stronger than you imagine and are able to do more than you think because you have Jesus alive inside of you. You might feel weak and unable to cope; you might feel like you are letting everyone in your world down. However, those are the very moments when you can ask for God’s strength and peace. This is both a mystery and a miracle: when you are at the point of greatest frustration, God is able to fill you to overflowing with His strength and peace.
It is when we get to the end of ourselves that we are more apt to surrender our will, our calendar, and our ways to God because we know that we can’t survive without Him. You may be at that point today. If so, you are at the place of a miracle! God loves to infuse weakened and weary women with His supernatural strength and joy. It’s what He does best!
Day 5
Scriptures: Matthew 11:28-30, Psalms 37:3-7, Exodus 23:12
A Place of Quiet Rest
In seasons of busyness and stress, isn’t it reassuring to know that the Father has a better plan for us? God has an all-encompassing solution for busyness, and it’s called “peace.” He has an antidote for stress, and it’s called “rest.” While you might feel that your life is spiraling out of control, know that even in the midst of a cyclone of anxiety, there is a place of quiet rest.
Let me assure you that even during seasons in which you feel utterly consumed due to the stresses of life, you can still reach this state of peace. If you can remain peaceful and unruffled when the world is warring around you, you have learned the sweet secret of God’s wonderful presence.
It is vital to order your life in such a way that when you make it through a season of breathless busyness, you can enjoy a season of respite. Your body was not designed to live at full throttle for eighty years. You were made with a deep need for rest. Rest will restore and rejuvenate you for the next season of intense activity.
God created our bodies for a six-day cycle of work, followed by a day of restorative rest. He created animals for rest as well. Did you know that even He took a day of rest, setting aside work after He had created the world in which we live? Because God ceased from His work for a period, and He created us to have built-in times of rest, I have a feeling that your body demands and deserves that rest!
Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.(Matthew 11:28 NASB)
Rest is found wherever our heavenly Father is. Rest is found when you come to the Lord with your problems, your trials, and your schedule, and you lay it all at His feet. Rest is the quiet confidence that God radiates to all who will take the time to respond to His call to “Come.”
It’s only in coming to God that you have any chance at all of living a stress-free life. Even within the onslaught of an exhaustive daily existence, you can have His peace when you determine to come to Him. Doesn’t that sound like a perfectly lovely invitation?