Cody Thomas

Recently, I have been feeling a mixture somewhere between conviction, regret, and frustration.

Do not misunderstand though. I love life right now. Marriage is wonderful. My wife is amazing. My design business is continually growing, which means I have cut back my hours at Chick-fil-A down to two days a week! I love my church and see great potential for the Kingdom there.

However, despite all of the good, I have still felt this mixture of unsettling emotions lately, and I think I know why. I think that I am tired of living with a lack of discipline in my life and tired of not seeing myself be a better leader in certain areas of my life.

Conviction because of the wrong that I see in myself.
Regret because of all the things I don””t do.
Frustration because of continually seeing the tension between who I am and who I want to be.

So, I have decided to take some action in order to right the ship that is my life. I am tired of seeing such a gap between who I am and who I want to be. I know that tension will always exist in my life, but I do not want to become complacent with it. Here are some steps I am taking.

Marriage:

• 10-10-80 approach to finances. I handle the finances in our house. I work with the budget. I pay the bills. But I have not done the best job with it. The most convicting part about my leadership in this area is the lack of tithing. We have not tithed 10%. Not even near 10%.
  My plan: Start the 10-10-80 approach with our finances. For every paycheck, I will immediately write out a 10% check to the church and transfer 10% into savings. Then, pay bills with the remaining 80% and live off what is left.
• Get into the Word with my wife. As the spiritual leader for my family, I have not done a good job of helping us grow spiritually or keep spiritual disciplines. I am tired of us neglecting our personal spiritual growth.
  My plan: As we were packing away a bunch of stuff to put into a storage unit (this apartment just is not big enough), I found two copies of the One Year Bible, which is a Bible with readings each day from the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs and goes through the whole Bible in one year. One is the NLT translation. The other is the ESV. I decided we would each read those Bibles each night and discuss what we read.

Design work:

• Wake up and get working earlier. Right now, my wife gets up at 6am to get to work by 7am. If I am working at home, I generally sleep in until 8am. Then, I will just go straight to my computer and start working. However, I am still kind of dazed as I am trying to wake up. This makes it very hard to work efficiently, let alone be very creative.
  My plan: Get up at 6am with my wife. Get a shower immediately to wake myself up. Brew coffee and eat something. Get to work by 7:30am.
• Be strategic with my day. Right now, I am not the best with time management when I am working from home. There is no boss yelling, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean!” I find myself easily distracted while working on design projects. (Do not worry. I do not charge for the time I get distracted in the middle of a project.). The problem is that I can do a lot more with my work time if I focused my time more.
  My plan: This plan is not quite as tangible as the others listed so far. I am not exactly sure yet what the answer is for creating more strategic time management. I have begun using Google Calendar to break up my day (i.e., 1 hour on Project X, 2 hours on project Y, 1 hour learning this new web feature, etc.). This has helped me stay on task and not spend all day on one thing either. However, Google Calendar has not been the complete fix. So, I plan to continue researching time management and task management strategies/applications.

These areas of work will be enough to tackle at this point. There are still other areas of life that I want to improve upon, but these few changes listed here will take a lot of energy and attention to implement. I will focus on these for now.

What areas of life are you most unsatisfied with? What tangible steps can you take to change it?

Here’s some updates about life for me. What I’ve been doing, what I’ve been thinking, and what’s next on the horizon.

• In three days, I will be married for two months. Wow. Sometimes it still blows me away that we are married. It took so long to get there (I don’t suggest engagements longer than a year by the way…16 months was way too long) that it’s hard to believe the wedding has already come and gone.
• Marriage is probably the greatest litmus test for pointing out my selfish tendencies. Nothing in my life has been able to so easily and so often point out my selfishness as marriage has. Now don’t get the wrong idea. Kindel doesn’t point out these selfish tendencies to me. She’s not nagging me or calling me out all the time. It’s not like that. It’s just one of those things that I feel so often when it happens, like my own conscience became so much more sensitive to pointing out selfishness. It’s like having a car alarm and turning up the sensitivity so high that it goes off just from loud noises in the parking lot.
• So what am I doing about my selfishness? I’m learning to serve and love. The key word here is learning. I’m certainly not doing all of this right and I know I fail sometimes. But I’m learning to serve my wife more and more and love her more and more. I thought I loved her before we got married, and I did love her. However, I now feel like I am only beginning to learn how to love her.
• Design work is picking up. I’m excited to get to do more design work. Not only because it allows us to pay our bills and put food on the table, but also because it allows me to grow as a designer. With each new project, I learn new functions in the software I use, new techniques to design more efficiently, and gain more perspective. My “designer’s eye” is not perfected by a LONG shot, but it continues to get better. Currently, I’m designing three new church logos for 2 different churches, branding sermon series packages for two churches, and doing some oddball design for a couple churches.
• Barista life to begin again soon. I should be going back to work at the coffee shop in less than a month. Gotta pay the bills.
• New website concept coming soon. This week I’m starting to work with a programming guru to put together a new website idea. More details to come later.
• Last week, I read The Call to Discipleship by Karl Barth. It’s an excerpt from his large book, Christian Dogmatics. It was a good read, but definitely a hard read. It was originally in German and translated into English. The sentence structures were very complex and many times confusing to follow.
• Now I’m reading God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It by Jim Wallis. So far, it is awesome! It is great to read the perspective of a Christian who doesn’t buy into the concept that God is partisan. It is also great to read someone who brings to light that abortion and gay marriage are not the only moral issues. War, poverty, education, and healthcare, for example, are all moral issues as well. So far, Wallis has done a great job of presenting an un-partisan view of politics with Scripture as its basis. I can’t wait to keep reading. I already recommend it.
• Free entertainment. By the way, the copy of God’s Politics that I am reading is from the public library. After Kindel got her name change done and got a new driver’s license, we went to the public library to get library cards. Instead of renting DVDs so much, we can go check one out for FREE. Plus all the books. Definitely an entertainment budget saver!
• I think we’ve finally settled into our apartment. It took almost two months, but I think we finally did it. There’s still some work to do here and there, and there is still parts to improve upon, but, for the most part, I would say we have finally settled in.

Overall, life is good. We are depending on God for direction like never before.