Before A. and I moved to Atlanta, the young adults’ Bible study group we attended spent a few weeks on lessons from the book First Things First by Stephen Covey (of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame) and A. Roger and Rebecca R. Merrill. While not an overtly Christian book, it offers tips and exercises that can be applied to matters of the spiritual realm just as well as the business or personal realm. Our fearless leader had attended a class about this book years ago at the prompting of his company. He was reluctant at first but came away excited to tweak the curriculum and gear it toward Sunday school classes and church groups.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read the book (though I might like to), and I also missed two out of the four sessions he taught, but I was intrigued by what I did hear. The foundational premise of the book is that the things that vie for our attention every day can be divided into quadrants. (Picture a grid labeled, from left to right.)

• Quadrant 1 represents things that are urgent and important. These are things that cannot escape our attention.
• Quadrant 2 represents things that are not urgent but important. These are things that ought to have our attention but often do not get it.
• Quadrant 3 represents things that are urgent but not important. These are things that are forced into our attention, like an email client that pings every time a new message is received. Reading it could probably wait, but often we do it immediately anyway.
• And finally, Quadrant 4 represents things that are not urgent and not important. These are things that should not get our attention at all.

The ideal as presented in this book is to live Quadrant 2 lives, focusing on things that are not urgent but are important. In a spiritual sense, this might be represented by prayer. Prayer isn’t urgent in the sense that your day will continue without prayer. You may get up, eat breakfast, get things done at work, and have quality time with your family without prayer. But it’s important to do so for many less tangible reasons.

But it’s the Quadrant 2 things that are so easy to let slide. The things that don’t impact the next moment. Especially in the workplace, many of us spend the majority of our time in Quadrant 1. This is not desirable.

So in an effort to lead people into Quadrant 2 lives, Covey offers a Mission Statement workbook. It asks you to list the most important things in your life and asks how effective you are at keeping those things first. While it may be easy to fudge on these open-ended questions, the rest of the handout gets more specific, asking you to rank things on numerical scales. You explore your quality of life by comparing the importance you place on certain things with how effective the time you spend on those things is. You calculate your urgency index and you give thought to people who have been influential in your life and why. You are asked to reflect on your roles and imagine that, at the end of your life, someone who knew you in each of these roles has a statement about you. What do you hope they would say? And finally, the workbook has you synthesize all of these things into a personal mission statement.

My first things included A. (my husband), reading, spiritual conversation with others, exercise, and food. I think I am pretty good at keeping these things first, but I am unsure as to whether or not these are the things that I should be keeping first. I was surprised to find that I displayed an imbalance in the importance I place on friends, possessions, my relationship with myself, and seeking an increased purpose of life and the effectiveness of my accomplishments in those areas. (Basically, I spend too much time and thought on possessions and not enough on the others.) I decided that some things I admired in people who influenced me were unconditional love, speaking the truth and mediating, hospitality, modeling a strong marriage, intelligence, and teaching abilities. I learned that I do not seem to have an inflated sense of urgency about work-related things; in fact, I was one of the few in our Bible study group who did not raise their hand in response to the question, “Is your career important to you?” (or some variation on that phrasing). I believe I will ultimately find true fulfillment outside the workplace, though I would hope the work I find will be a piece of that fulfillment.

The mission statement I came up with is this: As I seek to be focused and present, I will pray unceasingly (1 Thessalonians 5:17). I will place as great an importance on filling myself with spiritual food as with physical food. I will hold loosely to my “things” and tightly to my relationships. I will demonstrate love in as many ways as possible, including through hospitality, and I will seek to have a marriage that displays Christ to the world.

Or, I boiled it down to this: pray unceasingly eat heartily love unconditionally serve wholeheartedly

So far I am best at eating heartily, but I hope having this in words will help me stay focused on the things that really matter to me. I don’t think there’s only one right way to pursue the mission I defined, and to me, that’s the beauty of it.

Do you have a personal mission statement? What are some areas of your life in which you struggle to avoid the urgent in order to focus instead on the important?

This is a total shift in gears from yesterday's post. I'm loving the discussion going on there, so feel free to keep commenting. In the meantime...

I love folding laundry.  My mom used to refuse to fold my t-shirts because she knew if they weren't lined up perfectly I would just unfold the entire basket and refold it "my way." Somehow over the years, I developed a knack for folding fitted sheets, which I'm finding seems to be a bit of an anomaly in this world. Even my college roommate, who is one of the most fastidious people I know, despairs of folding the fitted sheet. Now, I will grant that it is more difficult to perform this act with a queen sheet than a twin, but I've been giving it a go and steadily improving. Here are my steps, for your folding pleasure.

(I think credit probably has to go to my mom for this, and to Real Simple for the packet idea. All images mine.)

Step 1:

Your sheet will come out of the dryer looking something like this. Shake it out and lay it as flat as it will go. It helps to have a large work surface on which to do this. I like using the bed.

Step 2:

Stick your pointer finger in the very deepest recesses of one of the pockets. It doesn't matter which corner you start with. With your finger buried tightly, match that corner up to the corresponding one. There's a pretty apparent seam at the point that resides at the very corner of your mattress, and this is the spot where you want to put your finger. Do the same on the other edge of the sheet and lay it flat in as much of a square as you can make it. The edge opposite the matched up pockets will be more of a curve than a straight line, but you have tight 90 degree angles at the top, and that's all you need.

Step 3:

Fold the sheet roughly into thirds. I think for this, I folded it over onto itself long ways, matching nested pocket seam to nested pocket seam and then folded it into thirds from the top down. This leaves the sort of crescent shaped bottom edge on the top, which is okay, because this is a pretty neat rectangle regardless.

Step 4:

Grab your flat sheet, which you have previously folded into a beautiful rectangle, and place the now-folded fitted sheet on top of it, with the pillowcases (folded into smaller rectangles) on top of it.

Step 5:

Fold the flat sheet over the fitted sheet and pillowcases, producing this neat little packet o' sheets. Admire your handiwork and feel like the most organized person in the world until you go try to insert the packet into your linen closet, whose shelves are too short to hold it and whose stacks of towels border on the chaotic. Shove the sheet packet in willy-nilly and forget about the chaos long enough to write a blog post.

Step 6:
Re-organize the linen closet?

....nahhhh. That would be taking things way too far.

I am a self-professed bookworm. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. The library is one of my greatest weaknesses; it feels utterly delectable to come out with a stack of books when I only meant to return one. Like Rory Gilmore, I think it’s imperative to always have a book with me. I’ve learned this the hard way, from wasted hours in waiting rooms or biding time before an event with no reading material. (I don’t take this to extremes, mind you, but I more often than not at least have a book in my car.) I was an English major. Yet I have not read, and do not particularly want to read, many of the books in the so-called canon.

That’s right, I just typed that out loud.

My alma mater didn’t help me with this. I took Surveys of American Lit and British Lit in high school for college credit, and the reading load was much lighter than it would have been in college. Also, as a somewhat progressive liberal arts school, my beloved university chose to read outside the lines and include many more modern, international, regional, and ethnic works than most schools. I skated by without even taking Shakespeare until my last semester, and though I ended up loving it, I hadn’t missed it until then. Yet I feel woefully unprepared to enter into conversation with English majors from any other place, because I know the topic will come up: what’s you’re favorite book? And I’ll have to admit that, currently, it may just be The Hunger Games or some other “unacceptable” piece of current literature.

That’s right, I just typed that out loud too.

But why don’t I like classic books? I started out okay. My childhood began with my mother reading me The Wind in the Willows and my father sharing The Just-So Stories. I progressed to the Little House books, which I loved because they were practically about me, since my name is Laura. But somewhere in there, the literary smut crept in. I developed a taste for Lurlene McDaniel and The Babysitter’s Club. I did my summer reading, of course, but sometimes it was a struggle, especially the year we were assigned The Hobbit. It took me the entire summer to read because I couldn’t follow the plot, hated the characters, and kept having to start over because I didn’t know what was going on. Perhaps it was all downhill from there.

I’ve enjoyed the occasional literary giant. I didn’t hate Beowulf, and I seem to remember enjoying Tess of the d’Urbervilles, though I can’t for the life of me remember or imagine why. But perhaps the nail in the coffin for my taste for the classics came with Pride and Prejudice. I liked the first sentence. You can’t argue that the first sentence is not impeccably drafted with a certain timeliness to it that sets a great tone for the rest of the novel. But the rest of it? I hated it. The female race may disown me once this post goes live, but I have to admit it. I hated Pride and Prejudice.

(For the record, I gave Jane Austen a few more tries and liked some other ones better, and I love the movie version of Sense and Sensibility, but for the most part she does nothing for me.)

I’ve tried to figure out what it is about the classics that I don’t enjoy. When I read the current books that keep me turning the pages and staying up late to finish chapter after chapter, I am often disparaging of the author’s choice of vocabulary, the stilted dialogue, and the cheesy and predictable plot turns. You’d think I’d be a perfect candidate for promoting well-written literature that has stood the test of time. But I’m not.

Here are some reasons I’ve started to flesh out, though I still can’t quite put my finger on the root of the issue.

• The emotional timbre of bygone eras doesn't resonate with me. I read to escape myself, and I find nothing more satisfying than having a vicarious cry or floating on the cloud of someone else's romance. Mr. Darcy's repressed proposal letter just won't cut it. I can't seem to like characters who don't wear their hearts on their sleeves.
• I can't relate to the lifestyle of many of the books. I think I would have been bored to tears being a lady in a Jane Austen novel! I always wonder what they did all day and how they found life fulfilling in the slightest. With books like Little House on the Prairie, I had my answer to that, so perhaps that's why they escape my wrath.
• I need at least one more bullet point here; my high school English teacher taught me never to end with two points if you can't come up with a third. But maybe that is my point: that I just don't exactly know why I don't like classic novels. I'm reading The House of Mirth right now, and I don't hate it, but it's not consuming me like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did. I don't find myself dying to go read it; rather, it's more of an effort. Once I sit down and do it, it's okay, but it's doesn't draw me in completely. And that's what I like about books. That's what the classics don't seem to offer me.

So, help me out here: If you’re a proponent of the classic novel, tell me why and what book I should read to convince me. Or if, like me, you’d rather read fiction of today, give me your rationale.

Maybe I can adopt some points from both sides and make myself into a true, well-read young lady. Though I might grapple with what “well-read” even means. What is the canon, and why is it so? What makes a book a “good book”? But that’s a post for another day…

• If you are brand conscious, Aldi is not the place for you. Everything is either their own store brand or some brand you have never heard of. Reviews seem to say the off-brands suffice just fine, but I know some people like to recognize a name, and there are definitely some things that I prefer to buy from a known reliable source.
• You will have to put in a quarter to get a shopping cart. This will allow you to unchain it from the rest of the carts. However, once you re-chain it at the end of your trip, you'll get your quarter back! And don't be embarrassed if you can't figure out how to reconnect the chain because, well, I might have had trouble too.
• They do no accept credit cards. They can do debit or cash.
• Bags are not free, and there are no baggers. You can either bring your own, which I do anyway, or pay a few cents for either a paper or plastic bag. The checkout clerk will put your items back into your cart and then you can go over to the bagging table they have set up to put them in your bags. I actually like this, because I am pretty particular about how my items get bagged and this gives me total control over it.

All of these things contribute to their ability to keep prices so low: buying cheaper brands in general, no risk of losing carts, no passing on of the cost of bags to your cost for foods, and only having to pay one employee per checkout lane. There were no frills to the inside of the store, but it was impeccably clean. They also had a security guard who was very prevalent, which I chose to take as comforting rather than frightening. All in all, I had a fun time discovering the inexpensive items on each aisle, and I will definitely be back!

Her name is Maria, and she’s twelve by now. I met her two years ago when I went on a spring break mission trip to Honduras with Birmingham-Southern’s RUF. I don’t remember meeting her on the first day we worked at the orphanage where she lived, but by the second day, she had latched onto me and even remembered my name. She seemed to like just sitting with me. We didn’t share a language, so we couldn’t converse in the ways that I was used to, but for some reason she seemed happy with me. The language barrier had been one of my biggest concerns about the trip, since I am a word person, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to love on children I couldn’t even talk to. Sitting quietly with Maria and occasionally exchanging names of objects in our respective languages was a challenge for me, but it felt right. The third day at the orphanage was visitors’ day. You see, not all of the children at the orphanage were orphans. Some were teenage girls who had been seized by the state in order to keep them off the streets and out of prostitution. Others were children who still had family in the area but no one who could afford to take care of them. And still others were on waiting lists to be adopted, so they received occasional visits from their future families. I had a hunch from the way Maria was clinging to me that she had no one coming. As Maria and I sat in the gazebo, maybe singing songs with some of the others, or playing pattycakes, two boys about her age came around taunting her. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I could see that she was bothered. We moved to another location, but the boys followed. Luckily, a translator was there and she helped me get a handle on the situation. The boys were teasing Maria for not having had any family visit her that day and bragging about the gifts that they had received–exactly as I had feared. Maria stormed off and hunkered into a ball and wouldn’t unfold for me. The translator came and coaxed a few words out of her. She wanted to sit with just me and not talk–just sit. I sat there with my arms around her and fought back tears. She went into her casita (little house) briefly, and I let a few go for the unfairness of it all. Why am I so blessed, my heart cried, when sweet girls like Maria have so little? She had never known love like I have been showered with my whole life. Evine, a friend of Maria’s came by and asked why I was crying, and I managed to convey in pidgin Spanish that I was sad for Maria because of the boys who were not nice. Evine stayed with us when Maria came back and worked at cheering her up, while I struggled to tell them about how much God loves them. We went off to a corner of the playground and played hand clap games until finally Maria smiled again. When it was time to go, I told her “esta bien” and “te amo.” With a big hug, I assured her “hasta manana.” And then I got on the bus back to our hotel and cried. No one had ever even gotten mad at those boys on Maria’s behalf. She was so tough, probably because she had always had to be. The only visible sign of anger I saw was her throwing a small rock at one point. But other than that, she just shut down. She put up a wall. And what words did I have, especially in Spanish, to break through that wall and convince her that God’s love and mine were real? Eventually there was no manana, and my group flew back to the U.S. I promised myself I would remember Maria and pray for her. I’ve done better at the former than the latter, but I do think of her often. That afternoon left a crater on my heart for the brokenness of our system. I have no way of knowing what Maria’s life is like now, or where she is. The brutal fact of the matter is that it’s unlikely she would ever be adopted because of her age. We talked a lot on that mission trip about the verse in James that says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). I saw Maria’s distress and I did what I could. The beauty of the gospel is that we have all been orphans, but God, the greatest Father, chose to adopt us. I love 1 John 3:1 because it uses exclamation marks! In the Bible! It says, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” But what kills me is that I have never felt orphaned the way Maria did that day. Sure, I can rejoice in my adoption into the family of faith, and that’s a beautiful thing, but I have loving earthly parents who have never let me lack for anything, least of all love. I have friends and a husband who remind me every day that they care for me. I cannot fix Maria’s situation. I cannot adopt all the orphans in the world (thought perhaps I could handle a few eventually). But I can pray that she knows God’s love, and that He has adopted her, and that perhaps that brings her infinitely more comfort than I ever could, and more comfort than that fact brings me, because she feels the lack of it so much more. Maria, I don’t know who you have become or where you are today, but you touched my heart and I hope I never forget you. Maria, te amo. (picture borrowed from Facebook)