faith

unhurried.

Natalie Price

December has a way of evoking deep emotions. I feel things differently in December than in other months. Maybe it’s because I was born on a Friday afternoon the last week of December, and turning a year older makes me pensive now. Perhaps it’s the expectation of Christmas. As a parent, there’s so much I want my kids to experience and remember about the Advent season. As I’ve been putting my kids to bed each night, though, I realize my intentions have outpaced my energy for the day. Guilt comes easily for not taking them to see the lights like we planned. Anxiety comes from waiting last minute to read our Christmas story excerpt for the day.

So much of my worry can come down to wanting more time. More hours in the day. More space to catch my breath before going onto the next item on my to-do list. I want more time with my kids when my energy is high, and I disappoint myself when I’m distracted and fragmented. It happens often, as I try to juggle house chores with work calls and deadlines. When my kids come home from school, I’m answering a flurry of questions and breaking up arguments. I become rash and untempered. I’m overwhelmed by a strong sense of urgency to eliminate chaos. And when I can’t, or I lack grace in my efforts, I sigh heavily. My shoulders sag.

I’m trying to not have saggy shoulders. Literally, because my mom has always thought it’s unbecoming of me, and metaphorically, because this season is a gift. Celebrating Christmas is full of opportunity and hope for what’s to come. I don’t want to waste it, or rush it, or miss the point of it. I wish life were like a Hallmark movie, though, where everything is serendipitous and nothing is realistic. Perfectly manicured characters can transform from Ebenezer Scrooge to Buddy the Elf in 90 minutes just by decorating sugar cookies and saving a small business in the St. Nick of time.

Instead, life for me is simply a series of choices. How do I want to manage my time? How do I want to respond to unpredictable outcomes? At the end of each day, did I reflect on the miracle of Jesus coming to earth as a baby? Or will I be too worried about how the post office lost my package that was supposed to arrive two weeks ago? Will I get flustered by my kids’ complaints? What perspective will I choose to have about work decisions I didn’t make?

I’ve spent time auditing my life and identifying symptoms, hoping they’d lead me to root causes. I’m hyper aware of how often the negative side effects of decision fatigue win, and I become hurried and reactive. I race against time when no one has asked me to. I become defensive, impatient, and take on a critically rude tone at home. So much of that can be traced back to needing Jesus, yes. But how I manage my time, especially what I give so much of my time to, is also a factor.

Next week, I’ll turn 33 against my will. I can’t turn back the aging process, but I did lay out in my journal what I hope for this coming year. What I want is actually less. Fewer things to manage. Less clutter to declutter again and again. Less self-induced stress, less time spent on my phone, fewer opportunities to waste time.

I can get so distracted shopping online for deals, which turns into buying things we don’t need or won’t need for a long time. Before I make the argument that stocking up on things is actually wisdom at play, let me just say: I sense the Lord challenging me to rely on him for my needs a little more this coming year than my ability to live like the apocalypse may come knocking tomorrow.

I exhaust myself managing all the things I own. I have eight billion cords, but I only know which ones I need for my computer, watch, and phone. The rest make for a tangled-up game of Russian roulette and trying not to act like Clark Griswold when I need to charge anything else. I have 15 book studies sitting on my shelf, when my preferred method for my entire adult life has been to read through the Bible using a yearly plan instead. Whenever I find a pair of pants I like, I buy four pairs the second they go on sale, just to be safe. Safe from what? Not sure. My grandmother was a child of the Great Depression, and I’ve used this to convince myself that my fear of lack is genetic. It’s not.

Checking email takes me forever because I have three accounts. One for junk, one for work, and one for personal. There are two people in life: those who like to see how big a notification number they can get on their inbox icon, and those of us who are more sane and want the email notifications cleared. Either way, I want less to manage. Because whenever I get overwhelmed, I drop everything, ignore everyone, and go organize closets and shelves. It’s cathartic, but it’s also a hamster wheel.

Fewer shoes to trip on, fewer books to display, and fewer distractions. More time with family, more time to focus, more to be grateful for, and more margin. Because when there’s more margin, I’m not in a hurry. More margin gives time for more meaning. I don’t mean to overspiritualize my age, but turning 33 makes me think about Jesus a lot. I think about how he gave himself margin. How he established rhythms. He ensured his time was never wasted. He was unhurried and yet always on time. Unhurried was a posture. It made him approachable. It helped him ask good questions, and it gave lost people the space to ask him questions. Jesus’s ministry was done in the margins of time.

I want to clear space to invite Jesus into the margins of my life. I want even the margins, the quiet corners, to have the opportunity for meaning. I want to exchange managing things for fostering fun. I don’t want my kids to have memories of me answering their questions while my eyes are on my phone. I don’t want them to remember the sounds of my hurried footsteps coming down the hall, scooping up dirty clothes in a huff. They’re five and seven, but before I know it, they won’t be. Less worrying about fleeting time. More savoring every moment.

Christmas is a funny time to arrive at my resolve for less, when there’s so much I want to take in. All the cringeworthy movies and local events. My shopping list for people isn’t finished. Gifts are still unwrapped. But it’s actually the perfect time to slow down and take in the real magic of the Christmas story.

The world thought they needed a powerful king to save them. What they needed was Emmanuel. A baby who in thirty years would grow in wisdom, stature, and favor in the eyes of men. He came quietly and without much. Yet he was everything, the hope of the world. We often don’t recognize the gift of what’s before us. It’s time that helps us appreciate what once was. There were probably plenty of people who missed Jesus then or miss the point of him now.

But Christmas reminds us that Jesus loved us so much that he came to earth to be with us. To reconcile us back to him for all of eternity. He was here for a short time, but the hope of Christmas is that Emmanuel, which means God with us, is the One who was, who is, and is to come. He is forever. My small brain can’t comprehend his version of time, but this I know: Jesus didn’t preach the Sermon on the Mount on 2x speed, and I’m a better version of myself when I’m not hurried by menial tasks.

So often I want things to be deep and the lessons I’m learning to be profound. The simplicity of slowing down this Christmas season isn’t flashy or impressive. I barely know what an unhurried posture actually looks like; I’ve lived on autopilot for so long. But I am practicing standing with my shoulders back.

Wherever you find yourself this Christmas, I pray you’ll be rich in the hope we have that a Savior has been born to us. A king! A redeemer. A friend. Who wants to meet you even in the margins of your life, too.

Take care & take heart,

sound mind.

Natalie Price

I don’t sing as often as I used to. But growing up as a Nelsen kid, there was singing all of the time. We had guitars and a piano at home for accompaniment, but when I close my eyes to remember, I only hear things acappela. I loved to sing. I’d sing so loud and at such length, my parents would gently try to ask me to sing quieter or give me permission to close the door so I wouldn’t disrupt their work.

My mom still sings in the church choir, and I’d hear her practice each week. My brother played and sang in the youth group worship band, and so did I. When my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins came over for celebrations, we had an unspoken tendency to hold hands in a circle and sing the Doxology, harmonies and all before eating. Every Who down in Who-ville had nothing on us.

I’d hear my grandparents sing or hum as I played with toys in their living room. My grandpa had this way of saying words that sounded more like he was singing them, particularly when he used the word “anyway” to transition the conversation. Music in every facet had meaning to our family. But the person I loved to sing with the most was my dad.

Every so often, he’d play his guitar and we’d sing Scripture he had set to music. Sometimes we’d sing together at church. He would often tell me how much he enjoyed hearing me sing. Dad would sing silly songs too at home. When my brothers and I were young, he wrote each of us a song. Jer’s song was upbeat. “It’s a Jeremy, it’s a Jeremy, it’s a Jeremy Taylor day!”

The first lines of the song he wrote for me ended on a low note and said, “I’m Natalie, I’m Natalie. I love my mom and dad. I’m Natalie, I’m Natalie, and sometimes I get sad.” Dad would always joke with me not to trip over my lip.

The truth was, I had Eeyore tendencies even at a young age. I was strong-willed and felt things deeply, emphasizing the lows of my day at the family dinner table. By high school, victimhood was part of my defense mechanism. On par, I denied it if people tried to tell me that. At the same time I was using deflection, I believed I was always the problem. If I could just try harder or be less needy. If I could be what people wanted, but also be different than everyone else, then the life I was living would have meaning.

Control was my master. I was chasing contradictions built on the shaky foundation of my self-belief. And somewhere along the way of unhealthy thinking, I didn’t sing as loud or as often as I once did.

It made for a confusing internal world. I had knowledge of all the “right” things, but I longed for the kind of wisdom that helps a person live differently. I’d always enjoyed books, but once I entered adulthood, I consumed more literature than my own humanity could sustain. That, too, became a measure of how impressive or interesting I could be. If I read or listened to 300 books in one year, I hit 400 the following year. I thought having this amount of information would ensure I’d never run out of opportunities for connection. My focus derived from a strong need to control my own narrative, rather than accept God’s invitation to participate in his narrative for me.

I read more slowly now. I read books through a second time. I realize that no amount of information consumption can change me when I don’t take my thoughts captive. There are so many that invade my mind. I’m critical of my appearance six ways to Sunday, my overreactive parenting, my chronic indecision, the chaotic responses I give to other people when I feel defensive (which is too often), and all the downsides I see to being on the other side of a relationship with me. Much of my daily energy goes towards image management, wondering what I look like to other people, overanalyzing conversations, and planning for scenarios that only live in my head.

Each morning, I wake up to this kind of unhelpful, overstimulating mental noise. Slowing down has certainly helped my racing thoughts. Writing things out, processing through what is true according to God’s Word and what is my own embellishment. It’s messy and challenging. I lose my temper with my kids and feel shame for that often. I know all the right things. And yet out of the overflow of my heart, I act and think in a way that opposes truth frequently. When I think I’ve reached the end of myself, I find that there’s more I haven’t worked out with the Lord. In some ways, I wonder if that’s just life on this side of heaven or another generous invitation from Jesus to give him all my burdens.

Every fall, I pray over what my word of the year should be come January. Last October, I sensed I was so broken I needed two words for the first time in a decade of picking a word for the year. So for 2025, I chose sound mind. I had heard a song by Kory Miller earlier in 2024 by the same name. Its lyrics would surface in moments of negative thinking, during frustration and impatience.

Over this past year, I’ve been discovering what pursuing a sound mind looks like after years of learning what it doesn’t. I started running again last November, and I found myself replaying Kory’s song again and again as I put one foot in front of the other. I played it in the car. In the kitchen. Without realizing it, I was playing it in my mind. And I started to sing along. It brought out something childlike in me to sing,

“Now every lie is broken because of the words You’ve spoken. I trust the way You made me. I was made for You.”

This is the slow path to renewal. And Jesus, in his steadfastness, has been meeting me on the road.
In my sadness over things I don’t want to process.
In my emotional tension, when I’m picking things about myself apart.
In my dissatisfaction with my perceived lack of spiritual progress.

When I feel my mind spinning, I hear him whisper, “sound mind.” After I raise my voice at home after promising myself I wouldn’t, and my stress levels have risen, “sound mind” comes to mind, and I see a better way. As I start panicking with all the things I have to do, I think “sound mind” and start making a list. There are times I can still know that Jesus has given me the gift of a sound mind, and still, I turn him away. But the frequency with which I choose to say yes is strengthening.

2 Timothy 1:7
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”

I’m Natalie. I’m Natalie, and sometimes I get sad. Often, I lack godly self-control. Sometimes I make things way more about what I feel rather than the people I love. But I can still sing my way through it. I can rise up against the disorder in my mind with a song. I can try to find the small child I once was, who sang about Jesus in grocery store aisles, confident that Jesus makes me a new person in Him. Because:

“You give a spirit of praise for the heaviness. Gave us a song to raise in the midst of it. I’ve got a sound mind.”

May you and I choose to sing when we don’t know what else to do. When we sense ourselves fighting to control our story outside of God’s love. May we sing when we feel certain and ask for the words to echo when we don’t. In this, may we sense His nearness through the steadying gift of a sound mind.

Take care & take heart,

a better way.

Natalie Price

The world likes to creatively and continuously divide us into two kinds of people. Positive people and pessimists (though I prefer the term “realist”), Type A personalities and Type B, morning people and night owls. I was in college, voluntarily signing up for classes that began at 7:50am, when I realized that I was, in fact, a morning person. I love paralleling my routine with the sunrise. I revel at the thought that I’m one of the first awake, and in the quiet of the morning, I’m most confident in the nearness of Jesus. Because I’m still. And I can sense him in the stillness.

It was on that college campus in rural Indiana that I chose to read my Bible each day if I could. I’d come back from my first class of the day and read at my dorm room desk before it was time for the next lecture. I was inconsistent, but always better for it when I made the time.

Over the next several years, my consistency improved, and I got creative with how I got in the Word. Then motherhood happened and I learned what it was like to begin again. I listened to the Bible audibly over baby cries and when I was driving or folding laundry.

I’d feel guilty when I would try to recall what I just heard, because I couldn’t on most days, distracted by spit up or the next checklist to tackle. In those first years, I would only make it to May until my Bible reading plan was off track. And then the next year, I made it to July.

But I learned not to quit. Having the plan was important to hold me accountable, but even then, I knew the objective was to let God’s Word get through me more than measuring myself by how I made my way through it. It just took practice.

The church I grew up in always ended the last Sunday of the year with a vision message about being in the Word of God somehow, every day. Each pastor took turns giving this message, and I’ve never forgotten its importance. My grandparents modeled this; my parents practiced it. I can tell you exactly where I’d see my dad’s Bible as a kid, visible and lived in. My mom’s Bible would travel around the house with her, most often landing on the kitchen table or counter. Seeds of steadiness took root within me long before I took up the daily rhythm myself.

Many years of practice later, I eventually arrived at December 31st in my reading plan. A small decision made alone in a quiet dorm fourteen years ago formed a habit of being in my Bible every morning. Not without struggle or adaptation over the past decade, but with resolve. It started trying to wake up 15 minutes before I predicted my kids would wake up. With trial and error, I kept waking up and trying again. It’s since morphed into giving myself an hour to sit at the kitchen counter with my Bible, my journal, and the aroma of brewed coffee.

In previous years, I’ve gone through the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. One year, I read the four Gospels once a month. Just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John twelve times over. This year I’m going through the Bible in a Year again, the plan I started with when I was 18. Each day when I finish reading, I reflect on blank journal pages. Never with any lines. Just white space reserved for ideas and ink.

I’ve had a lot to reflect on this year. I miss my grandparents. I wonder if I bring them up too often to other people, if I’m supposed to be removed from the grief by now. The truth is, I’m surprised by how often I wake up each morning and sit at the countertop and think about their legacy. Of what I wish I could tell them. What I remember when I think about them. So I write it all down.

One of the conversations I had with my grandpa in the last year was about memorizing Scripture. He was passionate about making it a priority. He’d work at his desktop computer and email the grandchildren documents with Scripture, ready to print, cut out, and keep in front of us. I never printed it out. I never tried, not even for Grandpa. I thought it was a nice idea, but I stopped trying to memorize verses when I got to high school because I had tests to study for and the periodic table to learn.

My dad is built like my grandpa. As a kid, I’d roam the house, looking for my parents to predictably ask them for things. Sometimes I’d come across empty rooms and observe the surroundings before trying another. Dad had a tall honey oak dresser with the pulls built into the drawers. No hardware, just solid wood that had goldened with age and a doily covering the surface. I’d see his watch and his wallet and a small, sweaty stack of his business cards, curved from being held in the shape of his palm.

On the blank side of the cards was Scripture in his all-caps handwriting that he wrote out with his favorite Pilot pens. He would take these cards with him on his morning runs and return them to the dresser when he got back. Perspiration at times made the blue ink bleed as he’d fixate on what they meant and what they asked of him.

As January turned to February this year, I sat at the foot of my grandmother’s hospice bed while she slept and read the book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. I fought back tears as I read, in part because the words he wrote are powerful and have outlived their author, and also because I wanted to live out the title like my grandma had. Eyes always fixed on Jesus. An obedience to his Word formed through fortitude and faith.

I finished the book after Grandma made it to heaven, and throughout the text, Peterson persisted in encouraging the reader to memorize Colossians 3:1-17, all the way to the very end. I printed out the passage from Bible Gateway and taped it to my bathroom mirror. I’d read it over and over while I brushed my teeth. Eventually, I moved the paper from the front of my mirror to the backside of the medicine cabinet door in favor of something much shorter, James 4:10.

Not long after Grandpa went to be with Grandma, I was sitting at the kitchen counter during my morning time with Jesus, and Grandpa’s words came to mind again. I failed to honor his hope of hiding God’s Word in my heart when he was living, but just like the mornings are new again, so is my opportunity.

I grabbed a stack of index cards and a Pilot pen. I flipped to the blank side because that just seemed right, and began to write out Colossians 3:1-17. One verse for every card. The cards made their way to my car dashboard, sliding around the open console for months. Every now and then, I’d flip through them when I was waiting at a light or waiting for the school bus. A few weeks ago, I made a last-minute decision to take them with me into the gym. A learned behavior observed in childhood.

As I began to move and to sweat, I worked my way through the cards and through the verses. In an hour and to my shock, I had all seventeen memorized after months of putting it off. If anyone saw me on the Stairmaster that day, they likely thought I was whispering incantations above everyone’s heads and smiling about it. But what I felt was free.

The Word of God is inspiring. Knowing that and experiencing it are two different things. “Grandpa, thank you.” was all that came through my mind as I walked out to my car. Lighter. Equipped. This was different from all the summer camps I spent memorizing Scripture and earning prizes. The prize now was a clear mind, a growing sense of the Holy Spirit speaking through the Gospel, made portable.

I went back to the YMCA the next day, and the next, and worked on memorizing it again. Once I had the first seventeen verses down, I kept going all the way into Chapter 4 the following week. I wrote out what I memorized and recite it now at home. I smile when I see that sweat is starting to wear the edges of the paper.

“May the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,” and “May the Word of Christ dwell in you richly” are slowly working their way into my self-talk. This is what Grandpa knew. This is the baton he handed to the generation after him. The Gospel changes everything. Seventeen index cards are infiltrating my entire thought process; their words are infusing themselves into my soul.

I still feel my imperfections, my impatience, and my shortcomings. I have an acute awareness that I’ve allowed my pride to hinder so many things, especially at home. And yet, I recall the beginning of Verse 1 and my eyes get set on a new path, a better way to live.

The last several years have been a process of renewing my mornings. Now, I’m reorienting my days by putting the Bible on wheels in my brain, so that when I get up from that kitchen counter, I am still being conformed to Christ. This morning, I was soaking in my last few minutes with the Lord, journaling final thoughts. My kids were arguing, followed by the bang of the piano keys, intentionally hammered on with an attitude intended to drown out the cries of the other brother, while a walkie-talkie was squelching between static, trying to reset itself to base.

Hurriedly, I went to my shelves to find a quote I had written out at the beginning of the new year in an old journal. As I sat back down, I overshot my search and landed on February 2nd, 2025 instead. My memory of those first few months of the year is hazy at best, eating meals out of my purse on the way to the hospital, leaving where I was on a whim to try to make it to see my grandparents in haste, never knowing if it would be the last time.

My breath caught in my chest when I read the notes I had taken that Sunday. Our church teaches the Bible expositorily, verse by verse. I flipped to my notes from the Sunday before and the Sunday after to make sure I was seeing correctly. We were finishing our study of 2 Kings before moving on to the book of Titus.

We weren’t studying Colossians at all. Except that Sunday. We studied Colossians 3:1-17. Four days before my Grandma passed away. The same day I began reading A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by her bedside.

On the last page of my notes, I wrote out the words Pastor Johnnie gave us that day:

  • Change the way we think!
  • 1 Peter 4 “because love covers a multitude of sin”
  • Thankful people are changed people. They see and treat people differently.
  • It’s really easy to complain; sometimes it’s hard to be grateful.
    • Abide in me & I in you.
    • You’ll know how to pray when you do.
    • John 15 & Ephesians 5
  • Whatever you do, whatever you say, may it be consistent w/ Christ

Jesus knew. He knew what I needed. He began his pursuit of my heart and my mind through Colossians 3 nearly eight months ago. Each morning at the 5 o’clock hour, when I turned on the dim light above the kitchen sink, he was preparing me to receive his Word for the very moment he ordained. The impressions made on my heart, seeing my parents carve out quiet time, seeing sweat-stained business cards in an empty room, talking with Grandpa in his recliner about memorizing the Bible, are evidence of God speaking to me through every conscious thought and subconscious memory still today.

If there’s only one thing I’d change–of course, it’s that I didn’t start practicing all of this sooner. My self-talk over the years has gotten really destructive and unedifying, likely a story for another day. Which is another reason why I’m grateful for the mornings. I am so thankful they always come with an invitation to begin again. To start new. Jesus is always teaching me something, and he’s always showing me in ordinary moments that he is the better way.

“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another,…” Colossians 3:12-13a

May the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, too, that you may experience the love of Christ firsthand, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Take care & take heart,