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Practical Chats for Intentional Living
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Monday May 13, 2019
Monday May 13, 2019
53. Practical Life Tips with Blogger and Speaker, Rach Kincaid
**Transcription Below**
Ephesians 5:10+11 “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.”
Rachael Kincaid is married to Chris and the mother to six children in her blended family. Additionally, she serves at church, coaches clients, and works as a hospice nurse, blogger, and speaker. She uses the internet to share her faith and encourage women.
At The Savvy Sauce, we will only recommend resources we believe in! We also want you to be aware: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Connect with Rach on all the social media platforms: @rachkincaid
Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas
Recommended Magazine: Life:Beautiful
Recommended Pastor: Andy Stanley
Sample of Books by Recommended Author, Jess Connolly:
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Gospel Scripture: (all NIV)
Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”
Romans 3:24 “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
Romans 3:25 (a) “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”
Hebrews 9:22 (b) “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”
Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:11 “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Romans 10:9 “That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Luke 15:10 says “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”
Ephesians 1:13–14 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession- to the praise of his glory.”
Ephesians 1:15–23 “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”
Ephesians 2:8–10 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God‘s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.“
Ephesians 2:13 “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.“
Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
**Transcription**
[00:00:01] <music>
Laura Dugger: Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, where we have practical chats for intentional living. I'm your host, Laura Dugger, and I'm so glad you're here.
[00:00:18] <music>
Laura Dugger: The principles of honesty and integrity that Sam Leman founded his business on continue today over 55 years later at Sam Leman Chevrolet Buick in Eureka. Owned and operated by the Bertschi Family, Sam Leman in Eureka appreciates the support they've received from their customers all over Central Illinois and beyond. Visit them today at Lemangm.com.
Today I'm excited to welcome back a returning guest. Rachel Kincaid is full of wisdom beyond her years. Some of her roles include being a wife and mother in a blended family, in addition to being a nurse, a blogger, and a speaker. Clearly, she's a high-capacity woman.
Today she's going to share intentional ways her family has kept their priorities in order. I hope you can find something beneficial in this chat to apply to your own life.
Welcome back again to The Savvy Sauce, Rach. [00:01:21]
Rach Kincaid: I am so happy to be back. Thank you.
Laura Dugger: Well, I loved getting to spend time chatting with you when we recently did an episode on reflecting Jesus in our relationships. For those who missed our chat, can you just give us a brief overview of who you are?
Rach Kincaid: Absolutely. So my name is Rachel. I go by Rach on the internet most of the time, and I've been a Christian my whole life. I've loved Jesus pretty much my whole life. I did not start walking with Him or getting serious about it, I would say, until my teens, early 20s, just when it became a faith of my own. And that felt really important to me to kind of figure out who I was and who I belonged to and what I was going to do with my life. That's pretty much my story with Jesus.
I am married to an incredible man who's a music director at our church, and we have six kids. So he brought two boys into our marriage, and then we had four kids in the first couple of years that we were married. So we had a boy, twin girls, and then another girl within about three and a half years. [00:02:24]
Laura Dugger: That's incredible. So you are managing a big family, and you're working full-time. We would love to hear some of your savvy tips. Let's just go through some of the common areas of life and hear what it actually looks like for you.
Rach Kincaid: Okay.
Laura Dugger: So, let's start just with sleep. How do you manage that?
Rach Kincaid: Oh, man. I can tell this is going to be my favorite episode, I think. I go to bed around 10 o'clock. Wake up around 6:30. And we try to work our sleep schedule... Let me rephrase that. We try to work our other schedules around our sleep schedule, both my husband and I.
We've learned the importance of sleep and so we tried to leave events at, you know, 7:30 or 8:00 if we have our kids so that we can get them in bed at a decent hour. If we're out on a date night, our favorite thing to do is go early, 5:30 to 6:30, and then maybe we grab dessert or whatever after dinner, and we're still home by 9:00 or 10:00. [00:03:21] So we'll stay up late if we have to, but going to bed around 10:00 feels like a huge win.
Then I would say waking up, I have learned how to relax a little bit in the mornings, but I wake up before my alarm goes off by about two minutes. And it drives my husband crazy because he feels like he's losing two minutes of sleep. But I immediately jump up, throw on some clothes, and I go into drill sergeant mode to get whatever needs to be done completed. So that we can actually get four kids downstairs, dressed, fed, the whole shebang, and on the bus in 20 minutes on school days. And that feels like, you know, I need a trophy for that.
But at the same time, I'm not super kind or gentle or warm in the morning. So I'm working on that. But I would say for the most part, I'm a morning person. I can't do a lot of really heavy conversations or solid work after about 8:00 or 9:00 p.m.
So I have also learned to be able to say how much sleep I need because I've got friends, even my husband, that can go With four or five six hours if they need to. I can't. I will immediately get a head cold or feel like I'm coming down with the flu if I get less than seven hours of sleep. [00:04:29]
So I would say knowing your limitations and knowing what you need is is super important, as well as knowing where your shortcomings are, your flaws, if I may say that, and learning how to kind of soften those up a little bit.
Laura Dugger: Really, having a healthy sleep routine is harder than it appears. So is this something that you and your husband have always done, or did you have to work at that?
Rach Kincaid: Oh no, we had to work at it. I would say the first thing we started doing was getting rid of the snooze. None of us snooze. We don't even allow our teenage sons to use their snooze function. We just need that we just yell, "Get up, get up, get up, get up, get up," if their alarm goes off and they're still in the bed.
So I think that's been really helpful. That took about two years for my husband to get rid of. I had never used a snooze ever, and I felt offended, insulted. I don't even know the word for it. When I would see him using, "What are you doing? But you're wasting all this time and you're being disrespectful to me. I share a bed with you." I mean, it was a whole thing. [00:05:24]
So we got rid of that first. I would say only recently... We've been together dating, I think almost 15 years and married. This is our 10th year of marriage. So I would say only the last few years have we started doing what I think has been the most effective. And that is bedtime and wake-up time the same time every day. So if you have to wake up early for something, that's fine. But for the most part, try to wake up at the same time every day.
Our idea of sleeping in is maybe one hour later than our weekdays or something like that, rather than the idea of catching up on sleep or staying up really late and then going to bed and waking up really late the next morning. We don't do that. So if we stay up late for a game or an award show, we still wake up at the same time the next morning, and we're willing to just be tired because we want our bodies to stay on that rhythm.
Laura Dugger: Oh, that is such a good idea. And now, thinking of your family, there's eight of you. So when you consider work, play, meals, extracurriculars, the list can go on, what does your family rhythm look like? [00:06:32]
Rach Kincaid: Oh man. So it's pretty chaotic right now because we have two teenagers who are driving in our home. Our eldest is headed to college, so that will bring us down to seven on a regular basis in our home.
For the most part, I will get the hard stuff out of the way first. And that is, you know, the stuff that your listeners might judge me for. But that is, we did not do any extracurricular activities for the little kids while the big kids were playing sports.
We felt like we only had a few years together as a family in one house under one roof, and we wanted as much together time as we could. So when our big boys were running cross-country or playing football or whatever, our little kids, they would just come with us. And we would set up a big picnic blanket and snacks and books, and that would be the event. And they would just run around there and get their exercise that way. [00:07:26]
Only recently have we started with the extracurriculars, and that would be Boy Scouts and dance, I think. And what we've done with that is only gone to places that allow us to put multiple kids in one class, as well as all of our activities on one night. Because I do not want to be that wife that never sees her husband because we're playing tag in and tag out on activities for our kids.
So one night a week, we can maybe split up and take our kids to different things and then meet back at the house. But I did not want to be doing that three afternoons or four nights a week. That's kind of how we manage our extracurricular activities.
With meals, we have dinner together around the table every single night. Sometimes we eat it on the floor in the kitchen. We have a huge old farmhouse that was built in 1890. It has not been renovated, so don't get any romantic ideas in your head. But our kitchen is this big open square. It's too small to put an island in, but it's really big otherwise.
And so we have this tiny kind of old French country table with the leaves that we can fold down, the little drop-leaf table. And so our little kids will sit around that and the rest of us will sit on the floor and we'll all eat together there. Or we'll all eat in our dining room, which is our main place of hangout and homework and eating and all that. [00:08:57]
We do try to eat one meal together per day. That feels important. All the research I've read talks about that. If you could do only one thing as a family while your kids are in there in the home. Like forget sports, forget everything else. Like just try to get around the table and eat. So we definitely do that.
Then as far as rhythm goes, our kids go to bed at the same time every night. I'm in grad school right now. I'm doing a lot of homework at night. So we'll sit in front of Netflix together, my husband and I, or we went through a couple of different series with the big boys to watch TV. So maybe one or two nights a week we do that.
Then we're in community a lot. And that's new for us. Because when I was first having babies, I was very private. I had major postpartum depression, and so I was withdrawn. I didn't want anybody to know that I was struggling. But over the last three to five years, we've really opened ourselves up to community.
So we are with people, families probably two nights a week at least, having people over to eat or going to their house or going out for ice cream or taco night or things like that. So that also gets priority over anything else in our schedules as well. [00:10:09]
Laura Dugger: Okay, this is just giving me so many more questions than when you talk about prioritizing getting together around a table at least one meal a day. You have a big family, so you have a lot of excuses you can make for why that's not possible. So, how are you even logistically making that a reality? What do you prepare and who helps, those type of things?
Rach Kincaid: Don't get the idea of a three-course meal with candles and all that in our dining room table. I can give an example. Last week, we wanted to go grab snow cones with some friends after dinner. And no one actually got home ready to eat until we should have actually been eating dinner.
So we were sitting at the table for, I think, 17 minutes. We were laughing about it because everybody was just scarfing it down really fast. But we meal-plan a week in advance. We grocery-shop only one time a week. I have a chalkboard that has all of our meals. My husband and I both cook. In fact, since I've been in grad school, he has taken over almost all of the cooking and the laundry. [00:11:14] I cannot remember the last time I did laundry. So that's been huge.
We make sacrifices. So he will come home from work and eat and go back to work if he needs to. We live near our church, so that's helpful. But I would say sacrifice is huge. Planning ahead is huge.
And then simplifying your meals and what you offer is huge. So we do a lot of instant pot meals, a lot of cold prep meals. We've been preparing a lot of vegan meals lately to try to cut down on our meat consumption. It saves a lot of money and we all feel healthier. So we've been doing a lot of cold Asian-type salads with Peanut sauces and things like that that have been yummy.
Those take about 30 minutes. Our dinner probably we try to keep it under an hour of prep and then we're sitting around the table for, you know, 20 to 30 minutes. Kind of like a school lunch where it's not a leisurely meal by any means but it does get us face-to-face with one another.
And I think we're doing that five days a week right now with at least four of our kids, if not all six. So that's been the goal and I think we're doing pretty well. [00:12:18]
Laura Dugger: I love that you also brought up the importance of community. Again, having a big family, how do you make that a reality? Maybe somebody's listening today and they want that community. What does it look like for you? How did you get started? Those type of things.
Rach Kincaid: I would say it's kind of the same thing that I felt about work when people would ask me, how do I find a job that I love or how do I get more time with my family? Because when I first started writing on the internet and blogging and things like that, I found a group of women, followers, readers, whatever you want to call them, that were really interested in a mom who worked outside of the home.
So I feel like I do kind of have a little bit of favor with that group of women because I've made a lot of changes in my life to help me balance my home versus work ratio. My answer to them was always, Do it. Be extreme if you have to. Leave your job, find another one. Work 12-hour shifts and work three days a week. Find a job that allows you to do that, or find a job that allows you to do four 10-hour shifts or something like that. [00:13:21]
And the same thing with community, the same thing with getting rhythms in your home, do it. If you have to be extreme and disciplined and diligent about it, I don't mean to tell anybody to leave their church, but if your church is not offering small groups, in a family setting that allows you to bring your kids and that kind of thing, then find one that does. Or make the change. Be the change you want to see. Do it at your own church.
So our family groups meet every other week. We meet every other Friday night. The kids are welcome. We all eat a meal together. And then the kids go upstairs and watch a movie and hang out with each other while the adults talk about the sermon from the week and pray for each other and just share, read our Bibles together, that kind of thing. That is the perfect setup.
Every other week is amazing because nobody really has an excuse to not prioritize for that. Our kids are involved. Our kids get to do multi-generational community with the teenagers and the adults that are in our group. But then if you're under 13, then you go upstairs and you hang out with your friends. [00:14:17]
We would have never had that option had we not left our church. So we had to leave. We had to find something new. We had to get extreme in order to do the things that we felt like God wanted us to do, to model our collective family life after what we thought He wanted it to look like.
So it's not about sitting around and talking about it. Sometimes it's about making those really hard choices. Like, what if you said, Only one kid gets to play a sport per season or something like that and we're everybody gets their season? But we're only doing one right now so that we can still have a few meals together per week and so that we can all go to sessions such as baseball game or whatever.
Our lives do not have to look like Everybody else's and our families don't have to look like what we think they're supposed to look like. My friend and I were laughing about this a few weeks ago because we were talking about how we don't allow our daughters to go to sleepovers or extended playdates right now because we're just not sure what kind of decision or policy we want to make for our family. [00:15:20]
I don't really want to have to interview somebody else's family. Do you have older brothers or anything like that? So right now we're just saying like no long playdates, no sleepovers, things like that. And I was talking to her about it thinking like, what if they think we're weird? What if they think that we're like the only parents out there that don't let them do that? And she was like, "Right. But like they're not missing out. They're still getting community. They're still getting socialization. We're not locking them in their rooms at home all the time."
On the same point, we are doing things differently from the way our parents raised us. So they're probably going to do things differently when they grow up too. And we can't feel guilty or weird about that. We just have to say we're doing the best with the information we have at the time.
So, for me, that might mean getting a little more extreme, and that might mean, can you believe the audacity of that mom only letting one of her kids play baseball and all the other kids had to sit on the bleachers? But you don't know, maybe next season the other kid gets to play basketball. So I think it involves decision-making and not worrying about what other people are doing or what they're thinking. [00:16:22]
Laura Dugger: I love that. How do you find time to personally connect with God?
Rach Kincaid: I read my Bible every day, try to read it in the morning. I started when I was coming out of a season of depression. I had some very militant checklist items. I know you're a counselor, so you probably are familiar with some of the basics of brushing your teeth every day and checking it off the list or making your bed.
What I developed is a little checklist in the morning that I called the five, five, and five. I would make my bed, make my coffee, and read my Bible. And each of those tasks took about five minutes. I would make my bed, walk into the kitchen, make my coffee, walk into the living room, sit in the same chair, and read my Bible for five minutes only. I cut myself off after that because I did not want to do it because I had to. I wanted to do it because I wanted to. And at the time, I didn't want to. [00:17:17]
It sounds a little twisty, but I would say, I'm going to develop this new pathway in my brain, this new rhythm in my heart to a level where eventually I will crave it. And that was about three or four years ago, and now I do. I crave my Bible every day.
I connect with Him by reading my Bible first and foremost. Talking about Him with people would probably be another amazing way that I love to connect with God. But then praying is one of my weaknesses. I have always grown up feeling like I didn't want to bother God with my problems.
What I'm working on currently is connecting with God in a constant communion kind of way, where I'm just chatting with Him throughout my day, asking Him for tangible things, asking Him for spiritual things, asking him to convict me, comfort me, and all sorts of things. I think those three ways probably: reading my Bible, connecting with other believers, and talking about Jesus, and praying.
Laura Dugger: What about when it comes to discipling your children? What does that actually look like in your family? [00:18:23]
Rach Kincaid: We do not read our Bible with our kids. We do not do nighttime story time and all of that with that kind of routine. Again, with the decision-making, there's only so much time in the day. So because we connect with our kids over the table for meals, that's where we do a lot of talking. We talk a lot about what's happening in the world, and then we try to relate that to what God thinks, what God meant when He designed us, and what He wants us to do about it.
Our kids are also very involved in the kids program at our church, and they come home with these little cards that help them find verses and talk about it. If I could give you one example of how I felt like I wasn't doing enough to disciple my son and then he surprised me with this story, and I realized that discipleship is a community-wide endeavor.
So the people, the trusted adults that are in our family group are discipling my son. And the people who are our servant leaders, that's what we call our volunteers at my church, they are discipling my son. And me, by living out a life that is following after Jesus, that is discipling my son. It's not necessarily having to sit next to him, read a Bible verse, pray with him, that kind of thing. [00:19:36]
So a few months ago, he had some birthday money, saved up his birthday money and bought this helicopter, and played with it so much that he was starting to kind of get in trouble with it. He was trying to sneak it out like in the middle of the night or waking up really early to play with it.
There was something I'm trying to remember the details. But whatever it was we had this talk with him where we said, "You're getting a little bit too obsessed with this helicopter. We need you to put it on the shelf. There's a time and place to play with it." It was a drone, like it could fly on its own So he would take it outside when he wasn't supposed to and it would crash into a tree. We would say, "You know, we don't want you to break it. We don't mean you to lose it. So you need to take care of it?"
Well, one day it wasn't working, and he's showing it to us. And we couldn't figure out why, because everything looked right. And we saw that a piece had been tampered with. And we asked him, "Did you mess with this little tab? If you pull this tab off, the helicopter won't fly." He said, "No."
Then, I mean, ten minutes later, he comes up to us. He's crying. He's weeping. "It was me. I pulled it. I thought that it was something else I could do with the helicopter. I didn't know. Also, I lied to you. And I'm really sorry." So he confessed that right away. [00:20:42]
And so he's processing it with my husband, and then I come upstairs because I hear them talking about it, and I sit down next to him. And he's not very affectionate. He's just not an affectionate dude. He likes to kind of sit next to me and look at me, not like crawl into my lap. So he was, I think, seven or eight at this point, and he said, "At church..." and he's what we call snubbing, which is when you're crying and doing this and trying to get your breath. And so he's doing the snubbing cry.
And he said, "At church, we're learning about treasures and how you're not supposed to store up treasures on earth because things can break and you can't take them with you, and that you need to store up treasures in heaven, things like kindness and goodness and learning how to be in God's family, because that's the stuff you can take with you. And I think I was storing up treasures on earth with my helicopter, and I think God wants me to stop." And I just lost my junk. [00:21:35]
So at this point, I'm like weeping. I'm like, "You understand. It's so beautiful." And then I realized I never taught in that verse. He learned it and discussed it at church. So it's just this cool reminder that I am not the sole person that's responsible for my kids' upbringing and their decision-making and all sorts of things, which is cool because it's encouraging in a way where you know that they can be loved on and raised up by a lot of different people. But you also know it's not your fault if they decide to walk away from all of that. It's all of us together doing our best to help them make the best decisions that they can by following after people who are following after Jesus.
Laura Dugger: And that is incredibly freeing. And now a brief message from our sponsor.
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Laura Dugger: What about your view of work? How does your family view work and teach it to your children? [00:23:47]
Rach Kincaid: Well, our kids are all very hardworking little people. I think I'd start by talking about my work. I've tried really hard for them to understand that I don't leave the house because I want to. I leave the house because I'm working for our family, but also I'm working for the families that I serve.
So I don't want them to view work as a I gotta go, you know, work for the man so I can put food on the table and it become this… I don't know, this discouraging dark kind of future that awaits them. So I want them to see that they have to share me with my work. I want them to see that they have to share me with the people that I serve.
I'm a hospice nurse. I work with patients and their families at the end of life. So I want them to see the importance of that. Mama is leaving because she gets to do this thing. And also, we get to have food on the table. It's both and. So I want them to see that. [00:24:43]
My husband has primarily worked from home almost their entire lives. And we want them to see that both men and women can take responsibility for their kids inside and outside of the home. So that's important. He works full-time hours. He's one of the hardest-working men I know. But he goes into church or out to meetings, and then back home, we have a music studio in our house.
So that would be another example. I want them to respect our work inside the home. For example, while I'm doing this interview, they understand they should not be knocking on the door, bothering me. They should not be knocking on the door and bothering Dad when he's recording something or working on music, because it is his work. So just this idea, this sense of respect for work, that we get to do it.
And also that they're not too young. So they each have chores that they have to do, and then they each have chores that they like to do, that they kind of go above and beyond on a regular basis. And that's been really neat to watch. [00:25:36]
Our baby started doing chores when she was three. So it's just cool to see that they don't have to wait. Just like you don't have to wait till you're an adult to matter to the kingdom of God or to be a leader or to make a difference in the world, you also don't wait until you're a teenager or an adult to actually contribute to society, to contribute to our family. That's been really cool to kind of teach them a work ethic from an early age.
Laura Dugger: I love hearing that. And I think so many women can identify with you if they're working inside the home or outside the home. So many people will say that they struggle with feelings of guilt or questioning. Has that ever been your experience being a working mom?
Rach Kincaid: The only thing I still mourn, which I'm open about because it's a grieving process, is that I never got to stay home with my kids before they went to kindergarten. That has been painful for me over the years. And I'm at a place now where I know that I spent so much time with them. [00:26:36]
I had such a flexible schedule. when they were very, very young. So if they were in preschool, I could come to their performances, or even now that they're in elementary school, I can come into the classroom when they need me there. So that's been sweet, but also hard.
I would not say I've had mom guilt about not being around for my kids, because from the very first moment that Chris and I talked about parenting together, we both agreed that we were going to be a marriage-centered family. So our family revolves around our marriage, and not in a selfish way, but that our marriage has to be healthy for our kids to thrive, and for our kids to grow up healthy, and for our kids, hopefully, to have healthy marriages someday.
So in order for our marriage to be healthy, there has to be finances in order, there has to be date nights, there has to be conversations that take place without being interrupted by kids, there has to be work that fulfills us, that brings us joy, and that brings us a paycheck. [00:27:37]
And so I've never felt like I should be somewhere that I wasn't. I've never felt that I should have been the one with my kids all the time. Now, if they had to go to daycare from the very beginning, I can see that that guilt would creep in in a way that just feels like a little bit of despair.
I would say I felt that on a small level because I never got to be the sole caregiver for any of my kids during infancy. I went back to work when they were five weeks old, and then the twins, I got to stay home for three months, which was a miraculous gift. And then the baby, five weeks again. I went back to work at four and five weeks postpartum with those kids.
So it's just been hard, hard physically, hard emotionally, hard mentally. But I just can't allow the guilt to be piled up on top of that. I know that I'm doing what God called me to do. I know that my kids are going to be safe. I know that they're going to be okay. And I know that they actually might be better off. They might be better off seeing me fight. for the things that God's called me to do. [00:28:36] I don't know. We'll find out someday.
Laura Dugger: I so appreciate your vulnerability and the truth that you share around that. I'm curious, then, you say it is a grieving process, do you feel like that grieving process started right after they were born, or is it more something that you look back and you're grieving now as you're a few years distanced from it?
Rach Kincaid: I think I started grieving when my daughter, my baby, who's five now, started losing her baby fat and we were having to get rid of clothes and things like that. The cute little chubby roll started to disappear. And I realized we're done having kids. We can never come back to this day again. And before I know it, they're all going to be in school, and we're running out of time to make a decision if our lives are going to look any different kind of way.
But the beautiful part of that grief was that God used it to show me what I was going to do for the rest of my life. So I became a nurse because I knew my husband was going to be in vocational ministry. We felt called together for him to be in vocational ministry. And knowing that the pay and the income and the work might be unstable at times, I felt like nursing was a really easy, flexible, secure kind of career. [00:30:00] So I picked it just because, hey, I like helping people, and I heard you can be a nurse anywhere in the world, so I'll do that.
But if you fast forward five or six or seven years, I had now been a nurse for that long, and still it felt like a placeholder position. I pay the majority of the bills so that Daddy can lead people to Jesus in worship. That was me. I had put all that on myself.
But while I was grieving, I felt the Lord kind of say, like, then what do you want to do? You don't have to do this for the rest of your life. What do you want to do? And so now I'm in grad school. I'm studying to get my doctorate. I'm going to be a nurse practitioner for the adult and gerontological population. So old folks are my... that's my sweet spot.
It feels cool because I can say this has to be worth it. At one point, I was working 60 to 70 hours a week. I was going three days without seeing my kids at all, because I would come home after they were in bed, and I would leave before they woke up. [00:31:03] Thank God I left that job and found a better one.
But at the time, I was like, this has to be worth it. This can't be what the rest of my motherhood/career looks like. So I'm grateful that I allowed myself to feel those feelings and express them. And I can remember how it felt to sit and stare at my husband with tears rolling down my face, saying, "I cannot be a nurse for the rest of my life in the current position that I'm in just to support you to do what God's called you to do."
And he said, "Then what are we going to do? And I said, I think I want to go back to school." And he said, "Then we are going back to school." And when I picked the program, he said, then we are going to grad school and we are going to get our doctorate and we are going to do this together. And the whole family has been so encouraging and cheering for me.
Now my kids do their homework alongside me while I do my homework. And it feels like this sweet gift where I knew going into it that I was gonna quote, "miss out" on a lot with my kids. But now I get to share something extra special with them that I might not have otherwise. [00:32:05]
Laura Dugger: Speaking of your background in nursing, let's talk about health a little bit because it seems you put a really high priority on your health and the health of your family. Is that right?
Rach Kincaid: I do. I care a lot about it. We can get into the topic of keeping your kids healthy, but too often I feel like that's a nuanced conversation that would need to take place face-to-face. I don't ever want anybody to feel that I'm judging them or that I'm saying there's only one right way. I'm sure you've been through all the drama of how you birth your babies and how you feed your babies and when you vaccinate your babies and things like that.
So we have made all sorts of different decisions about those topics, but one of the things that I think is very important is introducing and maintaining a healthy diet with my kids. Now, don't get me wrong. We love fast food. We'll eat ice cream, pizza, the whole shebang. But at home, for example, we don't serve them a different meal. If they don't like what we're eating, then they don't eat dinner. [00:33:06]
And we don't serve juice. We just drink water. That's all my kids drink. I bought them each a water bottle. They can put stickers all over it. That's their special water bottle. They fill it up all day.
Another example would be my kids have never been medicated, as far as I can tell, with antibiotics. So I try to avoid that so that we can use it if they have a raging ear infection or a raging strep throat or something like that. I want to be able to save it for when I know it will work. And just because of the prevalence of antibiotic resistance and all of that, I try to not take them to the doctor if they're sick unless it's met a criteria that I have.
So that would be another random example that you have to make the decision when you're in the moment. And every parent and every family is different but my kids having a sore throat or a cough or a fever things like that typically for me that just warrants more fluids, they have to sleep, they don't get to go to school and I use a lot of essential oils along with the ibuprofen and the Tylenol and all that and just kind of wait it out. [00:34:07]
Maybe being a nurse has helped me with that because it makes me relax a lot more. I'm working in a primary care clinic right now where we see a lot of kids and for my clinicals for school, so I'm learning a lot from the doctors there. Nine times out of ten they're sending people right back home and saying, "You know, drink Gatorade and go to sleep." So I'm trying to avoid doctor's offices if we can and things like that.
I'm trying to think what else. I think those are the big things: what we eat and how we try to stay healthy. Right now I'm looking at my kids out the window because we have kicked them outside. We try to do screen time and before or after lunch if it's the summer or the weekend and not both.
I know the max is two hours a day but that includes phones and all sorts of things. So I know I'm not even sticking to that. I try just to spread it out. So we are on three acres of land and we have a trampoline and a swing set and we just kick our kids out. So right now they're on the front porch and rocking chairs and they've just climbed a couple of trees and chased each other around the yard, and then they'll come in for lunch when it's time and probably go back out in the afternoon. [00:35:12]
We are members at a gym. So my husband and I care a lot about taking care of our bodies that way. They have some programs for the kids, specifically in the summer where they move their bodies a lot in different types of activities. And swimming. We take our kids swimming. So I would say we do a lot of that.
Sometimes we go to the park and play football together as a family with the teenagers and things like that. That's been fun. As far as food goes, we just try to do a lot of veggies. So we used to have a garden. Our chickens have now taken over the garden. We started eating a lot of vegan meals a few… actually a year ago now.
We've never had dairy, a lot of dairy in the house because my husband's a singer and it affects the vocal cords. So my kids have grown up on almond milk and haven't had a problem with that. We don't really drink anything other than water. So almond milk and your cereal, they're not really going to notice a huge difference between that and cow's milk. [00:36:06] So that's been pretty easy.
A lot of green veggies. We eat a lot of tofu, salads, we call them fancy salads. I've learned that if you serve everything in different dishes, put it in the center of the table and let the kids put their own toppings on whatever you're serving, it suddenly becomes a fun meal. So, we'll do a beans and rice bar or a fancy salad bar or things like that, and suddenly my kids are eating things that they swore they would never eat just because they got to serve their own plate.
We eat a lot at home, but we also live in the South, so we love Chick-fil-A, and we go there every now and then, too. So, all about moderation.
Laura Dugger: So, you totally just gave me some ideas for dinner this week. What about self-care? How do you handle that?
Rach Kincaid: I love the topic of self-care and really I love pop culture. And so I love it when people argue about ideas, especially on the internet. It started with the obvious bubble baths and painting my nails or getting manicures or things like that. But also now that I'm looking back I can see areas of my life where I was taking care of myself and I just wasn't labeling it that way, such as building white space into my calendar so that we only had one event per day or things like that. Saying no to things so that you're not doing back-to-back activities or whatever it may be. [00:37:32] That is self-care.
Remembering this idea that... I just feel like we are on this earth for a reason and it is kind of an ongoing battle against darkness in a way that allows us to bring God's kingdom to earth. I know that we're safe and protected and all that, but every day really can be a battle. This idea of fighting darkness with the tools that He has given me, to me, that is self-care.
I'll give you an example. Me building a capsule wardrobe so that I know what I'm wearing every day and I don't waste any time speaking death over myself or trying to figure out a way to buy new clothes when we don't have the money to do it or things like that, like that is self-care. Or me getting a facial, to me that is self-care because I want to know that I'm taking the best possible care of my skin so that it will last me to age 75 or 80 so I can still do ministry. Or working out in the gym, same exact topic. I want this body to carry the good news and for a long time, so that is self-care. [00:38:35]
But also, like, the bubble baths with the magazine, you know, that is self-care. I recently subscribed to Vogue because I was reading other magazines that were a little gossipy and gross and would kind of suck me into the whole dark world of celebrities, dating celebrities. I like Vogue because it has high-interest, high-caliber writing about interesting people and cool pictures of fashion and things that I'm interested in, but not in a way that makes me covet or feel like, oh, must be nice and, you know, feel bad or down about myself.
I recently… when I finish studying for a test or taking an exam or anything, I love to flip through a magazine, a Vogue magazine. It's easy. It's not me numbing myself. And that's what I want to talk about next. Not me numbing myself or turning my brain off, but me just enjoying things that I know help me to enjoy life more. I think it's totally appropriate. [00:39:31]
So the danger of self-care is when we are self-medicating, when we are numbing ourselves because we don't want to deal with whatever we're supposed to be dealing with. Right now, I am the healthiest emotionally I think I've ever been. I just finished counseling. I'm in this crazy place of breakthrough with my husband with radical vulnerability and accountability and allowing myself to be convicted when I need to repent or confess and feeling like nobody has any debt with me. Just feeling very wild and free and open. And I love that.
So, therefore self-care helps me to maintain and continue that. If you're applying self-care to a broken place, That's called self-medication. That's just like drinking too much or taking meds or whatever that you do to numb yourself. I think it's important to differentiate that and identify what are we doing for self-care and why and how is it helping our lives point more to Jesus. [00:40:31]
Laura Dugger: I think that's so good to make the distinction, and like you said, pointing it back to Jesus. That God designed each of us with a certain personality, and self-care is really just doing something that makes you more of the self God designed you to be.
Rach Kincaid: Right, right.
Laura Dugger: That was really helpful. If anybody's looking for another magazine recommendation, have you ever heard of Life Beautiful?
Rach Kincaid: No, I haven't.
Laura Dugger: I love it. It's kind of like real simple for Christians, I would say. It's got so much scripture and encouraging stories. It's called Life Beautiful. We'll put it in the show notes.
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How does your family intentionally live in community?
Rach Kincaid: Well, we are part of a church that has family groups. So I would say that, first of all, those folks get our priority. And that has been an interesting dynamic that's popped up in my life over the last couple of years.
When people... I'm not saying that I'm super popular and everybody wants to hang out with me. But if I get an invitation to hang out with someone, I have learned how to prioritize it. If they are not a woman in my community group and they are not a woman that I'm already actively investing in, whether that be mentoring or just a healthy two-way accountability type relationship, then I really have to say no, because I just don't have the time. [00:42:40]
So I've been able to prioritize relationships in my life based on the importance of community. So our family group from church is really important. The people with whom I serve at church are also really important. That's a separate group of people I serve in the teen ministry.
So the men and women that serve there, I want to get to know them as best as I can outside of church, because they are with me on the front lines when it comes to student ministry. And so I want to know them well. Those are the two big groups of folks that we hang out with. And then our kids just come alongside us all the time. So they're with us every time we're with these people, which is really cool.
Another interesting thing is over the last two years. I've started making time for one lunch per month with a couple of different girls So I think it's three right now that I'm hanging out with. They're either in college or out of college or newlywed.
And it all started out because they would ask me, you know, I'd like you to disciple me basically. I'd like to be mentored. But within two or three months, it became, we're just friends and we're just friends walking alongside one another, trying to point each other to Jesus. [00:43:39] And if I do have experience in an area that you need help with, I'm happy to share that with you. But that's been a really cool intentional piece of community as well.
Laura Dugger: Oh, I love that. How do you and Chris ensure that your household is marriage-centered and doesn't swing to the side of being child-centered?
Rach Kincaid: That's a great question. My husband is very strict about a couple of different things. And one of those, we used to listen to a lot of sermons and educational resources by Andy Stanley, the pastor. He's actually the one that created this idea of marriage-centered family. But he and his wife used to talk about disciplining their kids for only three things, and that was dishonesty, disobedience, and disrespect, the three D's.
So my husband still kind of sticks to those things. So he has a very low tolerance for disrespect, dishonesty, and disobedience. And I would say that the disrespect part is the most important part to the marriage-centered family. So if we have kids that are chatting in the living room and my husband and I are in a conversation in our bedroom and the kids just barge in, it's not even like, excuse me, we were talking. It will be ghosted in timeout, "We'll let you know when you can get up" or whatever it is because he wants that to be a very quick instant reminder that you are not allowed to interrupt Mama and Daddy. That is the most important. Unless it's an emergency. [00:45:03] And we taught them how to say, Emergency, if it is, because there have been a few. So that's been really interesting.
Another thing that he has implemented that I have followed him in is that they come out of timeout on their own. So the stairs is our timeout. It's in the center of our house. Everybody can see them. So they're not like hiding in secret anywhere. We just send them there all.. that we don't ever say timeout. But we send them to the stairs to reset.
So if they're mad at someone, if they've just freaked out, if they've been disrespectful or rude or even if they just need a break because they're starting to fight with their siblings, we'll say, Hey, go take a break on the stairs. And they can come out of that timeout whenever they're ready. They just have to come process it with an adult. I think that also kind of feeds into the idea that we are not revolving our world around them. We're inviting them into our world. And the way that we handle conflict is taking a break, confessing our sin, having normal, healthy, level-headed conversations with one another. And so we try to implement that in our home. [00:46:01]
Laura Dugger: So many practical tips there. What about the topic of the Sabbath? Is there anything that your family does to honor the Sabbath?
Rach Kincaid: We do. Chris and I have to take a Sabbath. First of all, Sunday is, very rarely, Sabbath for anybody who works for a church or even if you serve a lot at a church. So I think it's important to look for another chunk of the week, whether it be four hours or eight hours or whatever you could do, where you call that your Sabbath as well.
So Sundays are definitely not our Sabbath, but they are for our kids. So we come home after church and they rest. We all rest for a little bit, but typically I'm only home for about two hours before I have to go back to church for the teens.
So Chris and I, before grad school, we took a Sabbath together every Thursday morning. Back in the day, it was every Friday. But for the most part, we try to take four hours together. where we grab breakfast out together or go on a walk together or try something new. We took a spin class one time together. And it's just that reminder that, again, with Jess Connelly, I feel like I always talk about her, but she and her husband are so wise. And they have talked about, we work from a place of rest. We don't rest from our work. [00:47:15] So the harder we kind of swing into rest, the more momentum we're going to have rolling back into the work.
And so if God is powerful enough to create everything He did and He still took arrest, then we need to model our lives after Him. So I would say separate from Sunday, if Sunday is wild, and it doesn't have to be all day, but we definitely do.
And we typically put our phones somewhere where they can get lost. If there's an emergency, we'll turn the ringers on. Basically, we just don't look at them, you know, put them in the front hallway or something like that and try to really engage with one another. We are also currently reading through a marriage book together on audio. So it's really cheesy, but he has one earbud and I have one earbud and we listen to a chapter at a time.
Laura Dugger: That's awesome. What book is it, if you don't mind me asking?
Rach Kincaid: It's called Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. And the chapters each end up being about 30 to 45 minutes on audio. So it's been perfect for us to just do one chapter at a time. But the kind of the theme is that what if marriage was designed to make us more holy instead of happy? And this idea that marriage is an example of Christ's love for the church. And so therefore, it's supposed to be hard and refining because Jesus died for the church. [00:48:34] So it wasn't like this easy romantic love. So it's been really cool.
Laura Dugger: That's so great. We've covered so many topics, but is there anything else that your family does that you would like to share?
Rach Kincaid: I would say making adventure out of the mundane has been really powerful for us because we are a family of eight and obviously the resources are finite. We have found ways to make things fun in areas where we might not be able to experience adventure in a way that other families can.
So I'll explain. We've never been able to go on a spring break vacation to Disney World and spend thousands of dollars on making memories that way. But this past spring break, we made t-shirts that the kids wore every single day. I made a playlist, and we came up with one adventure that we did each day. Sometimes it was as simple as dollar cupcakes at a bakery in town or going to the park or the library or something like that.
My husband is great about being silly with it. And so he will do things like call everything spring break, whatever. Like, "Come downstairs. It's time for spring break breakfast." and the kids are falling over themselves to get downstairs and it's a bowl of Cheerios. It's not a big deal.
I think that has been really cool, a practical way to make life fun instead of just saying, well, someday when we raise these kids and we have more money and we have more time, our life will be more adventurous. [00:49:54] I try to bring the adventure to the right now.
Laura Dugger: That's so fun. Is there anything else that's consuming your thoughts in this season?
Rach Kincaid: On my bad day in my flesh, I'm worried that I will leave the wrong kind of legacy. I'm worried that my kids will remember the hard times, the times that I yelled, the times that I embarrassed them or I didn't handle things correctly, and that that will define their relationship with me and maybe even their relationship with God. So that's what I let my thoughts do when my flesh runs away with me.
What I am reminded of is that God's grace to me is also God's grace to my children. It's a gift, and they can learn how to use it. And as long as I continue to go low and go humble and remind them that I'm doing this for the first time, and I love them with all of my heart, and I'm, quote-unquote, "doing my best," but even my best is not enough because they need Jesus to fill those holes and those voids and those wounds, and then they're able to receive that grace and then maybe extend that grace back to me. [00:51:03]
So consuming my thoughts, yes, just because I've got a kid out of the house now, and then one going to kindergarten or in kindergarten, and that just feels like, wow, such a sense of finality. Everything's moving so fast.
I keep screwing up every day, but just to remember that, like, right, you do screw up because you are human in need of a Savior. And as long as you continue to remind your kids of that and share that Savior with them, we're going to make it. We're going to make it with happy memories, and the legacy will be a legacy of the gospel.
Laura Dugger: That is very relatable. No doubt listeners are going to want to follow up and connect with you after hearing you today. So where can they find you online?
Rach Kincaid: I am at Rachkincaid.com and Rach Kincaid on all the social media platforms. So I look forward to talking with you guys.
Laura Dugger: Awesome. Well, as we close today, we are called The Savvy Sauce because "savvy" means practical knowledge. And so today we would love to hear, what is your savvy sauce? [00:52:01]
Rach Kincaid: I think at the risk of going so boring with this, because it is practical, to stop before you go anywhere or do anything or start a busy day and really prioritize what it is you have to do. That helps you stay on track and it keeps you almost like with this sense of fulfillment and accomplishment.
So if you're not a to-do list person, maybe you should become one. Because I have one on my desktop of my laptop and one on my chalkboard in my kitchen, one on my phone. And these are just things that pop into my head not like a must do this by this day. Just things that are popping into my head. Because when I get them out of my head it gives me more room in my head for the things that matter like engaging my kids, engaging my community, spending time with the Lord, spending time with my husband. So I would definitely say to just stop, pause, and prioritize.
Laura Dugger: That's so good. Man, I could just ask you questions all day long. I've really enjoyed this time together, and I've learned so much from you. So thank you for being a guest again, Rachel.
Rach Kincaid: Thank you for having me. [00:53:05]
Laura Dugger: One more thing before you go. Have you heard the term "gospel" before? It simply means good news. And I want to share the best news with you. But it starts with the bad news. Every single one of us were born sinners and God is perfect and holy, so He cannot be in the presence of sin. Therefore, we're separated from Him.
This means there's absolutely no chance we can make it to heaven on our own. So for you and for me, it means we deserve death and we can never pay back the sacrifice we owe to be saved. We need a savior. But God loved us so much, He made a way for His only Son to willingly die in our place as the perfect substitute.
This gives us hope of life forever in right relationship with Him. That is good news. Jesus lived the perfect life we could never live and died in our place for our sin. This was God's plan to make a way to reconcile with us so that God can look at us and see Jesus. [00:54:11]
We can be covered and justified through the work Jesus finished if we choose to receive what He has done for us. Romans 10:9 says that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
So would you pray with me now? Heavenly, Father, thank You for sending Jesus to take our place. I pray someone today right now is touched and chooses to turn their life over to You. Will You clearly guide them and help them take their next step in faith to declare You as Lord of their life? We trust You to work and change their lives now for eternity. In Jesus name, we pray, amen.
If you prayed that prayer, you are declaring Him for me, so me for Him, you get the opportunity to live your life for Him.
At this podcast, we are called Savvy for a reason. We want to give you practical tools to implement the knowledge you have learned. So you're ready to get started? [00:55:13]
First, tell someone. Say it out loud. Get a Bible. The first day I made this decision my parents took me to Barnes and Noble to get the Quest NIV Bible and I love it. Start by reading the book of John.
Get connected locally, which basically means just tell someone who is part of the church in your community that you made a decision to follow Christ. I'm assuming they will be thrilled to talk with you about further steps such as going to church and getting connected to other believers to encourage you.
We want to celebrate with you too. So feel free to leave a comment for us if you made a decision for Christ. We also have show notes included where you can read Scripture that describes this process.
Finally, be encouraged. Luke 15:10 says, "In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents." The heavens are praising with you for your decision today. [00:56:11]
If you've already received this good news, I pray that you have someone else to share it with today. You are loved and I look forward to meeting you here next time.
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