New parents often complain about the monotony of taking care of a newborn. Every day is basically the same, and the days all blur into each other. They have no idea if it’s Monday or Friday. It’s just an endless series of repeating tasks.

It can be depressing.

So far we’ve talked about habits and routines. They’re good building blocks for life. But if all you’ve got is a series of things you do all the time, then you’re going to feel like a parent of newborn without a newborn to make it worthwhile.¹ You need to have something beyond groups of habits. What you need are rhythms.

While habits and routines are things you do on a daily (or mostly daily) basis, rhythms are the regular things that happen over the course of a week, month or year. Things like birthdays and holidays, the beginning of spring or autumn, lazy Saturday mornings. They are the punctuation marks that keep the momentum of life moving ahead.

Now, a lot of these rhythms are built into our culture – New Year’s Day, Valentines Day, Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. On a family level, we have birthdays and anniversaries scattered throughout the year. For the most part those rhythms can’t be changed, but they can be influenced – as in, you can decide how you want to observe those occasions.

But you can do more than just observe cultural norms. Just like habits and routines, you can build your own rhythms. Rhythms like weekly and annual reviews, sabbaticals, vacations, date nights, etc.

And this is really important as you learn to keep yourself aligned with the Kingdom of God. You need time to step back out of the day-to-day to rest, to evaluate where you are heading, to connect with people.

We’ve got one more alignment to discuss, and then I’m going to tie them all together for you.

Photo by Fathoni Hidayah on Unsplash