A Quiet Simple Life | Sallie Borrink

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23

A Quiet Simple Life

You are here: Home / Archives for Sallie Borrink

Sallie Borrink

Living Simply By Limiting Emotional Drainers


One of the lessons that took me the longest to learn when seeking to simplify my life was to limit the emotional drainers. For far too long I allowed myself to be emotionally drained by things and people that were not really beneficial and did nothing to make my life more simple, joyful, or peaceful. I realized that I was investing my limited and precious energy in things that were not nearly as important as my husband and daughter. Anything that took away my ability to give them what they needed had to go.

For me it has included two key areas.

Heartbreaking Stories & News Online

Quite awhile ago I ceased looking at blog stories about sick people and especially sick children. There were even some blogs I stopped reading because the authors wrote frequently about and linked to stories about sick and dying children. I didn’t stop reading because I didn’t care. I stopped reading because it was too emotionally draining to read the stories. The stories would haunt me and sap me emotionally.

I also substantially decreased my news intake. In fact, for the past two weeks I’ve taken an almost complete break from the news. We don’t have TV reception so I never watch the news. My news comes from either online or if I pick up a newspaper when I am out somewhere. Apart from seeing a couple of headlines in a sidebar while doing research for a client, I haven’t looked at news these past two weeks.  It was an intentional break to free myself up from all the junk in the world.

Related to both of these is the fact that I have stopped reading heartbreaking news stories such as natural disasters and war. I read almost nothing about the recent earthquakes in various parts of the world. I heard something about a mine last week, but did not even look it up.

I know I’ve said it before on here, but I do not believe God intended us to be drawn into every negative story or disaster that takes place in the world. Our hearts and minds cannot deal with and process all of that. We were not meant to look at disturbing photos over and over again while listening to horrific details hour after hour on cable news.

And so I have chosen not to fill my mind and heart with things that only drain me of my emotional resources.

Drama Kings & Drama Queens

The second area is drama kings and drama queens. David and I have dealt with a lot of them over the past fifteen years. We made some very key mistakes in how we dealt with these kinds of people early on in our relationship and marriage. But we finally got to the point where we realized that drama was very bad for our health and our home. And so we now avoid it, even at the risk of offending people.

Offending someone is not nearly as important as maintaining our emotional health.

By drama kings and drama queens I mean people who can never be happy with themselves or can never be happy unless they are in the midst of some kind of conflict. As strange as it sounds, I really believe there are people out there who are not happy unless they are in the midst of conflict. It is almost as though they are addicted to the energy it releases, even if the energy is negative.

Drama kings and drama queens also include people who thrive on controlling others. They are manipulative and simply can’t be trusted to act in ways that are healthy to all involved. Drama kings and drama queens are the type of people who find and manufacture drama where there really is no need for drama.

In describing drama kings and drama queens, I want to emphasize that they are not people with just regular life problems. Everyone has problems. I have no issue with having people in my life with problems. I consider it a privilege to be friends with people as they go through life struggles. But struggling through the ups and downs of life and drama are two different things. I will gladly walk with someone through a trial or difficulty. But I now run the other direction when I encounter drama.

Limiting Emotional Draniers For My Family’s Sake

Some of these lessons were hard to learn. We made some significant mistakes in the past in these areas. But I know Caroline needs a mother who is healthy, happy, and whole. Anything that lessens my ability to serve my daughter and my husband has to be critically analyzed and dealt with.

Expending significant amounts of energy on people and places that really have little to nothing to do with me is not wise stewardship.

Category:  | 10 Comments

Introverts in the Church


I can’t remember how I found this, but it was one of the most insightful tidbits I’ve read in quite some time. It has to do with introverts and how they integrate (or not) into a local church body.

Introvert Involvement In Church

A review in Christianity Today highlighted this part of the book Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture:

Extroverts, who want to increase their level of involvement, may proceed roughly in a straight line as they move from the periphery into the nucleus of the community. They move from stranger to acquaintance to participant to core member as they increase the breadth and depth of their relationships, finding more energy as they progress into the community. The journey of introverts into a community, however, is better conceptualized as a spiral. They take steps into a community, but then spiral out of it in order to regain energy, to reflect on their experiences and to determine if they are comfortable in that community. They move between entry, retreat and reentry, gradually moving deeper into the community on each loop. The introverted path into community, much to the confusion of many extroverts, never reaches a point in which the spiraling form is shed.

This. is. so. true.

At least for this introvert it is.

I wish I had read this about fifteen years ago as I have struggled with settling into a church ever since I moved away from my home church to a new city. To be factual, our struggle with settling into a church has not been only an introverted thing (although it has been a significant factor). There were other dynamics at play as well (health, pregnancy, doctrine, family issues, etc.) that all have contributed to our seeming lack of ability to settle down happily. And I’m sure we left some people (and pastors) confused by our strong interest and then our subsequent leaving.

I haven’t had the opportunity to read this book yet as I still can’t do much reading. But I will be adding it to my wish list and look forward to learning more.

Help and Encouragement for Introverts

Adam McHugh has a site called Introverted Church, a spin-off of his book Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture.

Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted CultureIntroverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted CultureIntroverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture

Adam mentioned The Introvert’s Corner on his site as well. It is a secular site, but I was very encouraged by some of the things I read there and some of the comments. Sometimes the best encouragement in the world (and the cheapest therapy!) is just to read other people expressing the same things you are thinking. I especially enjoyed “It’ll Be Fun!” and Other Extrovert Lies and the follow-up discussion of Fun, Introvert Style.

A few of my ideas of hades on earth (ala the discussion on the first link):

  • Cruises (being stuck on a ship surrounded by miles of water with thousands of people I don’t know full of extroverted activities and overeating?)
  • Team-building, especially anything physical (mental exercises are OK since I tend to excel at those)
  • Super friendly churches (I’ve been at churches that by the time the service started, I was exhausted from the noise and interaction)

Hope you find some encouragement from the links!

Category: 28 Comments

Teaching Children To Read For Pleasure


Growing up I was a voracious reader. But as I’ve admitted elsewhere, I’m not in any danger of being labeled a literary snob. I’m not much into reading all the classics that everyone says you have to read.

Frankly, I read for two reasons. One, I want to learn something about a particular topic. Two, to escape and relax.

I read for the pleasure of it. I think that is why I didn’t enjoy AP English very much. Too much analysis and picking apart what the author meant by this object or this symbolic metaphorical doohickey.

That’s just not really me.

So I found this article quite interesting: The Case for Slow Reading.  From the article (bold mine):

Open any newspaper and you are likely to find a story of some school whose students have read a million, two million—some big number of pages. As a payoff, the teachers wear pajamas for a day, or the principal shaves his head or agrees to eat worms, a reward to the delighted students. Then Pizza Hut or some other franchise that sponsored the event hands out coupons for nonnutritious food to the voracious readers.

It’s all great fun, a good story, a terrific photo op. But something bothers me about this picture—it’s as though reading has become a form of fast food to consume as quickly as possible, just one more cultural celebration of speed.

This association of good reading with speed permeates our schools, from the hugely popular Accelerated Reading Program, to “nonsense word fluency” tests in which young children have to decode “words” at a rate of more than one per second, to standardized tests in which reading is always “on the clock.” To be quick is to be smart; to be slow is to be stupid.

As a confessed slow reader, I would like to make a case for slowness. By slowness, I don’t mean the painful, laborious decoding some students must do or the plodding march through some assigned novels that may take weeks. Any pleasure or success in reading requires fluency and the ability to read with some pace.

But there is real pleasure in downshifting, in slowing down. We can gain some pleasures and meanings no other way. I think of the high-speed trains in Europe that I always wanted to ride, ones that hurtle through the French landscape at more than 200 miles per hour—that is, until I learned that at these high speeds, even the distant scenery becomes a blur. The retina simply can’t take in a clear picture at that rate of movement.

The same thing can happen in reading. I’d like to explore what we miss when we define good reading as fast reading and to argue for what Ellin Keene has called “dwelling” in the texts we read.

Author and media theorist Neil Postman provides a foundation for this argument in his classic book, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979). Schools, Postman argues, should act on a thermostatic principle; a thermostat acts to cool when a room is too hot and heat when a room is too cool. According to Postman, schools should act to check—and not to imitate—some tendencies in the wider information environment. “The major role of education in the years immediately ahead,” he writes, “is to help conserve that which is necessary to a humane survival and threatened by a furious and exhausting culture” (p. 25).

I get the impression Caroline is going to have certain areas where she kind of ambles along at her own pace. She does not like to be rushed and, unless something changes in the coming years, I can see her as one of the children who is smart as a whip but does not do pressure-packed standardized testing very well.

Pressure-packed reading seems absolutely contradictory to me. Reading should be pleasurable and enjoyed at a leisurely pace.

So it will be interesting to see how this develops in our home. We are doing our best to live a quiet, simple life. We have found the pleasure of downshifting and slowing down. How that translates into Caroline’s education has yet to be seen. But I hope to give her the gift of loving and savoring reading.

Category: 3 Comments

Happy Thirteenth Anniversary To Us!


Today David and I are celebrating our thirteenth anniversary.  Two people who met online and married in eight months. We’ve done very well considering our (at that time) very unorthodox beginning. But God’s hand was on us and continues to this day. It is only by God’s grace that we have what we have.

As I was thinking about marriage last night, the Lord impressed upon me the “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”. We’ve run the full gamut of these over the past thirteen years. Job loss, spiritual abuse, miscarriage, infertility, financial loss, health problems, family estrangement. The list is lengthy. Neither one of us could have ever foreseen all that would happen to us during these past thirteen years. There have been some very hard times.

And yet I would not trade them because I’ve had a kind and patient man by my side through it all. No, David is not without his faults and he will be the first to admit it. But when I think of all he has gone through over the past thirteen years in caring for me and serving me, I can honestly say that I have a much greater appreciation for what it means when men are to love their wives as Christ loves the church. David has given sacrificially to me and now Caroline over and over and over again.

So as we say good-bye to our thirteenth year and begin our fourteen year together, I praise God for how He has brought us through so much with our love and commitment to each other still there. I am even more thankful for the steadfast love of our God who walks patiently and lovingly with us each day.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:20-21

Category: 15 Comments