Day 13 #formationFOUNDATIONS | Relationships

Today is the thirteenth day of our #formationFOUNDATIONS series. In case you're new here, you can read more about this series or start from the beginning at SacredOrdinaryDays.com/FF. Our goal for this series is to help you...

• LEARN about different spiritual practices that you can adopt for your own walk. You will learn how to make the most of your Sacred Ordinary Days planner or the FREE Essentials Workbook you got when you joined our newsletter list, which has all the most essential pages from the planner that we don't want anyone to miss out on.
• PRACTICE these things on a daily, weekly, seasonally and yearly schedule. You will be able to lay (or bolster up) a strong spiritual formation foundation by clearing the space for your new spiritual practices to deepen.
• SHARE your experience with people who speak the same language. You'll get to know the other members of our community, who are some of the wisest, most interesting, super fun, and most real people I know by following along on Instagram or Facebook or inside Common House, our ecumenical online community.

Day 13 | Relationships

Take a minute and think about or list the relationships that you have:  your family, your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors, your faith community, etc.

Who are the most important to you? Who are you investing your time in for your own sake and for theirs?

Now take a look at your calendar for the week. Does your calendar reflect those important people?

Are you making your most important relationships the "big rocks" in your life (like we talked about on Monday) or are they the "small rocks," fitting in as there is room to be squeezed and shuffled?

In different seasons of life this looks different, too. Maybe you are in a season of care-taking, either for children or for an adult in your life. Your time may be filled to the brim with the people that matter to you. (Perhaps some alone time or time with people who care for you or people with whom you are able to have a mutual relationship need to become "big rocks.") Are you fully present with them in that time or are you there in body only? We don't ask these questions so that you feel guilty. Care-taking is hard work! Are you taking care of yourself as you care for others? Are there ways you can make changes in your schedule so that you can take better care of yourself? 

In our weekly examen in the planner there is a space to prayerfully reflect on relationships. Having a weekly touch point about how my intentions are matching with my actions has been really helpful. It can be far too easy to let the relationships that matter the most to me be the ones that I am the least intentional about. I use the reset space to note who I want to be intentional about spending time with, be it a family member or a friend, in the next week. Sometimes it is sending a text or making a phone call, sometimes it is planning a weekend to go visit someone.  

Another way to incorporate relationships into your weekly rhythm is to use time with someone as a rest or reward. Maybe planning a coffee date is a rest for you or phoning a friend is the reward that you need after finishing a project. 

• What relationships matter most to you?
• What can you do today to be intentional about making that relationship a priority?
• Perhaps try practicing the examen, using the page from the Essentials Workbook or in the August PDF, if you don't have a planner yet. When you get to the section on relationships, you might ask...
• What’s going well in your relationships?
• How are you treating the people around you?
• What relationships need
• tending?
• How can you build into the lives of those who matter to you?

Head over to Instagram or Facebook and post using #formationFOUNDATIONS and tag us @sacredordinarydays, please! Or, join the conversation inside Common House, our ecumenical online community. 

We'll always share the latest blog post in the series at sacredordinarydays.com/FF when it's live. So, check there each day for the latest!