More about Less

I was scavenging through some old writing, searching for a piece I could dust off and use for my website. Reduce, reuse, recycle. One title, “Quiet My Heart,” immediately leapt out like a long-lost photograph tucked in the bottom of a photo box. It is also a song I return to every now and then, one that has always resonated deeply with me. Its lyrics echo the need to hush our restless minds so that we might hear the whisper of God. What startled me most was that this particular piece of writing held the story of the very moment I first heard God speak the word “less.” I had completely forgotten I had recorded the experience that would eventually become the seed of my book.

There was so much more to my story.

It was March of 2021. Mark and I were in a small group study of Divine Direction by Craig Groeschel. That week’s assignment was to choose one positive habit to begin. As I prayed, asking God for my “one thing,” the word came—clear and simple: less. I didn’t include this specific story in my book because I wrote the manuscript three years later, after trudging through mountains of excess that piled up like clutter in a house with too many rooms.

The word never left me, but the details of the story drifted away like sand slipping through my fingers. I only managed to piece together fragments—a memory of working on a book about teaching children to read—that later made its way into my writing.

What I could not have foreseen at the time was that Mark and I were about to change churches and step into a dry spiritual season. It was as though we had wandered out of a lush garden into a wilderness where the soil was cracked and barren. It was not just personal, either—division ran through the country like a fault line splitting the ground beneath our feet. In my book, I share how I strayed toward “more,” piling my life with activity and excess, but I also entered into a season of “less”—a stripping away of church family, fellowship, and spiritual nourishment.

God was preparing me.

For the desert.

The message now is clear: it’s the small, ordinary choices—the daily pebbles dropped into the jar—that eventually fill it to overflowing. We rarely recognize their weight at the beginning, but when we look back, we see how those choices shaped the landscape of our lives.

Going back to school and becoming a teacher was one of those journeys. It took five years of uphill climbing, with countless moments when I wanted to quit. But step by step, habit by habit, the road led me to where I am today—teaching online, a calling I never would have reached without those steady footprints of faithfulness.

Every day I am blessed to teach children across the country, guiding them with wisdom and virtue alongside dedicated parents. I am also blessed to stand again in front of children at church every other Sunday, teaching in person—something I once thought I had laid down forever when I entered the world of online education.

The story is still being written, and I am eager to turn the next page. God has a way of surprising me—His plans arrive like sunrise spilling over the horizon when I least expect it.

I have no doubt that what’s ahead will be more than I could ever hope or imagine.