RECHARGING | Julie Caldwell

Here's a little story I'd like to tell about three bad brothers that I ... no, wait a minute, this is a story about a kitchen. Several years ago, when we settled my father's estate, I decided I wanted to remodel our kitchen. I thought that was something he would approve of supporting financially. See, my father was a great designer, builder, and lover of the kitchen. He did none of these professionally, but he did them almost daily for himself and for us. When I say builder, he literally built a sawmill (sorry for those of you who already know this), cut down the trees on our property (pine trees, mostly), designed and built every structure on the property - our house and the camp buildings. I was always surrounded by lumber, the smell of sawdust, the sound of the sawmill, and pine boards, with their interesting knots looking back at me. I knew I wanted to do open shelving in our kitchen because I wanted it to function like a workshop, laid out like my father'

Yesterday in church, as I was listening to a sermon about the armor of God, I wrote down these questions: “Am I recharging my spiritual battery – the strength in my inner person – daily? I do this diligently for my phone and my computer, but I do it for myself?” There have been times in my life when I could have answered “yes,” but recently I have slacked off on intentionally recharging my inner person. Instead, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning, when I start to drag during the day, and when I want to wind down at night is look at something on my phone or computer. It’s not always social media, but often it is. I realized that I had fallen into a pattern of using this kind of distraction as a form of recharging. And I’ve been wondering why I’ve felt a little drained :) The truth is that scrolling social media often does opposite of recharging my battery. Someone’s post makes me mad, sad, (and dangerous to know – sorry, that’s a reference to an 80’s album) disapp