Protect Your Space: A Boundary Leading to Self-Care
Do you ever come to a point when you are feeling that everything you are doing is not sustainable? That you haven’t made any space for the true you to come to the surface? I know I have. Whenever I find myself in this rut, I come back to this mantra gifted to me by a friend: Protect Your Space. There are four ways that this practiced has helped me become a more grounded, loving, centered version of myself. I am sharing those ways with you today after a months-long journey of learning how to protect the things that are precious to me. Things that make me come alive, and things that make my world make more sense, or just the things that can make my week go by smoothly.
All of these things need to be protected. It is an act of self-care.
Learning how to protect my space has shown me that covering these things that help me take care of myself in a little protective dome, helps me pour from a full cup. Some of the things I need to protect for my own sanity-sake are: Mondays, my dining room table, the quiet early morning, and my War Room. These are the spaces of my life when I can get grubby and get focused. Sometimes it is butt-in-chair writing time. Other times it is hair pulled back, scrubbing toilets time. Often, it is prayerful time.
This practice of protecting my space has become a small form of worship, the kind that I didn’t know I needed until I did it. When I show up for myself on the Monday, or in the morning, I come prepared to give God my offerings for the rest of the week, or the rest of the day. Like David said, in the end of 2 Samuel, “I refuse to offer something to my God that cost me nothing.”
