Welcome back! You've been busy creating an inspiration board and starting your gratitude journal. You're ready to really dive into identifying your core values. In these next lessons you will want to identify what is important to you as well as what isn't in order to move forward.

We usually know what's important to us but if we haven't clearly defined what our life would look like if we were living a life that was aligned to our core values, then we can easily allow our time and attention to get diverted to the lesser things and distractions can take over. It's easy to do in this culture. It's always been easy to do! There is a fallacy that life was so much simpler back "then" but we see from the Martha and Mary story in Luke 10 that there is always busyness that can distract us from spending time on the things that matter. If we are not intentional with our life, we can easily surrender it to the things that are urgent but not necessarily important to us. Read more about Martha and Mary in this story and see if you identify as Martha or Mary or maybe both at different times of your life.

For these next lessons, it will be important to prayerfully consider what is most important to you, what your heart is most passionate about, and not try to make judgments about whether these things are realistic or not. Just try to work as if your life is a blank slate. You are laying a foundation for the rest of this journey so don't short circuit this step or try to fix anything just yet!

If you start to see some Aha! Moments or you become emotional about some realities you are encountering with your life as it is versus how you want it to be, take a journal and write about what you are feeling. Or head on over to the Simple Life Simple Faith Facebook group and pose the topic with the members there for support and encouragement. It can be sobering to see what we identify as important to us but also see that we aren't living aligned to that. Or that we've allowed the clutter and busyness of life to take us away from what we really value. This is good...you're getting to the heart of the matter and soon you'll be able to put your priorities in place as you simplify and make room for what you want in your life.