This week’s Five Minute Friday word is intentional. It’s the perfect word for me because it fits with my word of the year for 2018: focus. So, today, I’m sharing how I came to my word of the year in case it might help you find direction for your year ahead.

I have a life-long habit of losing focus in little ways and big ways. It started when I got really good at multi-tasking with two little kiddos, a teaching job, volunteer craziness at their school, and a sweetheart whose job took him away from home every week for three or four days.

I became the master juggler. I could wash breakfast dishes and help with spelling words and plan the day’s lecture on thesis statements and beat myself up about not having time to get some cardio. Oh, and I could smile too. I am a doer, by the way.

And lately, over the past decade or so, I’m learning how to be a be-er. You know the saying. We’re human beings not human doings. Right. I am way too good at doing. Not so good at being.

Choosing My Word of the Year

A few years ago, I attempted the word of the year thing. Yeah, it’s a little hokey. But sometimes I really love hokey. (Thanks to Kate Winslet in The Holiday for the reminder. “Sometimes I love corny.”)

But I didn’t do so well with the follow-through.

This year, I prayed about the elusive word for the year. So much pressure. What should it be? What did God desire for me in 2018? (Well, I know what God always desires for me in big things. Love God. Love my neighbor. Repent. Receive forgiveness. Give thanks. Repeat.)

I think God is okay if I want to choose a word to help me with those big things. I also know God is okay if I don’t.

Two words kept coming to me. Focus and listen. A wise friend suggested my word might be both. So I prayed some more, watched the squirrels at my bird feeder, colored a visual prayer for someone else, read a chapter in one of my six in-progress books, wrote a chapter in my novel, and knitted while I caught up on This Is Us. Yes. It’s a problem.

Focus. Being intentional about what I am doing when I am doing it.

So, I’m going to intentionally focus on the little things that help those big things blossom.

I’ll let you know how it’s going . . .

Are you a master juggler trying to figure out how to focus? How are you doing that? Have you thought about a word of the year?

This post is linked up at Five Minute Friday where writers encourage each other and share their free-writing weekly.