My wife is always in a form of crisis. You see, her personality is such that she’s a dreamer. She’s an entrepreneur at heart, someone who loves starting things and getting others to carry them out. Her crisis comes because she struggles with a discontent because of her desire to be somewhere else, to be someone else, or to do something different. Over the years it has been a wonderful blessing for our family!

Right now, however, one of her critiques is that we’ve lost our “hippie” way. It has been a process over the last four years of us learning new things, making new commitments, and cultivating new passions. Nothing necessarily huge…cloth diapering, chemical free, organic food, gardening, riding bikes, taking the bus, etc. It’s simple stuff that many of us, if not most of us do. But lately…wait for it…we’ve begun to use paper plates occasionally! We’ve gotten addicted to (as my previous post shared) X Factor on youtube! We didn’t take the bus at all during the summer! We use ziplock bags and plastic tupperware!

Ok, so you’ve made it thus far, here is what the post has been working toward. Through my wife’s worries over our use of paper products and therefore the compromise of our ideals, we were able to notice something interesting. At first certain choices are incredibly hard. It takes constant remembering and a willingness/ability to make continual new and different choices. It’s hard. At times its exhausting. Other times making new life choices is real easy at first as you have the excitement factor motivating and encouraging you. In these situations its not until a few months into it that you hit a wall and you question why you ever even went down this road! I think this is true of breaking your addiction to creating excess garbage and waste in your home and breaking your addiction to nicotine in its different forms (obviously, this is a very loose connection that is not equal on both sides!) BUT…BUT, the wonderful place that we’ve found ourselves with some of those life changes we’ve made in the last four years is that we don’t even notice them! What was, at one point, a constant annoying choice is now second nature. I don’t even notice that we don’t use chemicals. I don’t miss them and rarely remember that we don’t have them in our home. It’s become normal, routine…

I don’t know about you, but there are certain things in my life right now that I crave to become routine and normal. There are some painful choices, annoying choices, and constant choices that just get old to make even though I know they’re the right choices to make!

I hope you find yourself wanting to make new choices, and anticipating the day that those choices become your new normal, your new ground floor to which you can continue to build up on. What a blessing it is to choose.