I have a job assisting a friend in California three and a half days a week. It is done virtually, which gives me the flexibility in schedule and the joy of working from home. I get to write, encourage people and work.

My first job, after I left the workforce, was to take care of my daughter during the separation between her father and me. To be perfectly honest, I think we took care of one another that year.

God promises beauty from ashes and here it was.

I was living it. Friends started referring to my life as ‘Inbarbsworld.’ I wanted people to see that life after divorce can be beautiful. It’s a balance of letting go and letting God.

Last year was the year of learning how to live. This year I’m refining it, or it’s refining me. I am grateful to follow God and be sober.

In 2014 this Blog began. It encourages me to see it has reached twice as many people already this year alone, compared to the entire first year. The job I love is paying off! Thank you for reading what I love to write.

That is what I do. I love on people until they can love themselves. Most of it is done virtually, but I do enjoy going out into the real world. The trip to Colorado was an eye opener for me with the loss of technology. If you missed it, you can read it here I got better as the week went on, but it made me ponder if I was addicted to my phone. The notifications make life easy.

My phone also makes life noisy. It’s fun to push myself and see what I can live without. Does the phone make my life that much better? When my phone bill came due, I decided not to pay it. To just skip a week and see what happens. To think of it as a phone fast is what worked for me. The weekend was a fail. It would automatically connect to WiFi if I was visiting a place I had been before and everything would start rolling in. Today, I had to turn it off completely.

My life is quieter. Through my laptop, I can still encourage people virtually, it just may not be so immediate. Without the notifications, I have to remind myself to go in and check email, banking, social media and everything that used to notify me of activity.

My time feels like mine now. The beauty that surrounds me in more noticeable because I’m not staring at a screen in my hand.

Maybe you gave up your phone a long time ago. I didn’t think I could. If this keeps going like it has today, I’ll be on a new level of simplicity. Dejan Stojanovic says it best, “They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.” They just did.