Today I’m excited to introduce you to one of my new favorite bloggers: Jodie from jodienoted! I found Jodie’s blog a few months ago and just fell in love with her positive outlook on life, her thought-provoking personal stories, and her beautiful craft ideas. Go check her out–you won’t be sorry!
From the moment Torrie contacted me about writing for her Mid-Week Boost feature my mind has been going nonstop. What am I passionate about? What excites me? Where do I focus my time and energy? And honestly I was kind of stumped. At one point or another I’ve always had a specific passion. Music, for one. Or baseball, writing, sewing, friendships, and the list goes on. They used to consume my thoughts and actions. Lately, however, they are missing. For the longest time I could not put my finger on why I had lost all zest for these things that I normally love. What has happened that they no longer have a place in my life?
It didn’t take long for me to answer my own question. Life. Life is what has happened. I’ve become so overwhelmed by what life has handed me that I haven’t given my old interests the time of day. This got me to thinking, though. If I have no passion right now – no gusto whatsoever – how am I still able to get through each day? And it hit me. I am passionate about something in my life right now. Something that means the world to me. I realized that through good times, bad times, stresses, trials, busy schedules and everything in between, what I am perhaps most passionate about is living and loving my life regardless of what comes my way.
I will be the first to admit that I don’t have an exciting life. At least not the kind of exciting that the rest of the world looks for. I haven’t traveled much of anywhere. Heck, I’ve never even been to California. I don’t spend money on big TVs or new cars or a nice house. I didn’t graduate at the top of my class from a well-known university. I haven’t climbed the corporate ladder. I can’t offset my bad days with retail therapy or a quick weekend getaway. Frankly, I’m just a normal girl living one day at a time. But my little life and my simple days are all I’ll ever need.
If I spend a day cleaning up my daughter’s messes and burning dinner and only get a breath of fresh air when I walk to the mailbox greeted by a stack of bills, I have still lived a great day. I have reasons to smile. Why? Because I have a daughter to make messes with and to hug and snuggle and love. And I may have burned dinner but we had food to eat and a dinner table to sit around together and laugh about my culinary failure. And the bills may pile up and will seemingly never stop, but my husband was able to receive an excellent education and we have a house that is warm in the winter and a car that gets us where we need to go. If I can’t find joy in the most ordinary of days, then I’ve failed to understand the meaning of true happiness. It is in the simplest activities that I’m able to see how meaningful my life is.
It might seem silly that finding joy is my passion. But maybe the joy we all find and learn to recognize is what leads us to more good things. Maybe finding joy in the ordinary is just the first step in allowing ourselves to really see what we have to offer and the great things we can accomplish.
Building a fort on a rainy day / Learning how to make the best sugar cookies from Grandpa
Thanks so much, Jodie! (P.S. I loved your last post on what faith means–I haven’t stopped thinking about that quote, actually!)
