Do you ever feel like your life is too full, too noisy, or stretched in too many directions?

In this episode of Faith Fueled Living, Kristin talks about the power of pruning your commitments and why so many women feel overwhelmed, scattered, and spiritually disconnected.

We explore what it looks like to do a honest “life audit” and ask a simple but powerful question: is this actually aligned with what God is asking of me, or have I just slowly added more and more without stopping to evaluate it?

This conversation is about more than time management. It’s about clarity, obedience, and making space for what actually matters.

Kristin shares why cluttered schedules often lead to cluttered minds and disconnected hearts, and how intentionally releasing unnecessary commitments can bring more peace, focus, and alignment with God’s direction for your life.

If you’ve been feeling stretched thin, constantly busy, or unsure what to say no to, this episode will help you step back, breathe, and re-center your life around what truly matters.

Takeaways

• Why feeling overwhelmed often comes from overcommitting, not lack of time
• How to recognize when your schedule no longer reflects your priorities
• The difference between good opportunities and God-aligned assignments
• Why regular life audits bring clarity and peace
• How saying yes to too much can dilute your purpose and energy
• What it looks like to “prune” your commitments intentionally
• Why mental clutter often mirrors schedule clutter
• How to start simplifying without guilt or fear of missing out
• Questions to ask before committing to anything new
• How creating space can help you hear God more clearly

Get the Create a Life You Love Journaling Wokrbook to start being more intentional with your life and schedule here.

Grab the Rewire Your Mind: From Negativity to Joy- download here.

Grab the Joy Rising- Daily Gratitude & Joy Journal here.

Download My Free Joyful Living Devotional: https://kristinfitch.com/devotional

Ready to take your first step towards a more joyful, faith-filled life? Download our Reignite Your Passion Workbook and start living with purpose today!

Christian podcast for women, overcommitted and overwhelmed, simplifying life, intentional living for Christians, pruning commitments, faith based time management, Christian life audit, decluttering your schedule, finding balance in life, spiritual clarity, hearing God more clearly, saying no as a Christian, boundaries and faith, emotional and mental clutter, purpose driven life, Christian women burnout, simplifying your life with God, aligning with God’s will, Christian productivity, spiritual growth habits, life organization for women, peace and clarity, living intentionally with God, faith fueled living, Christian mindset shift

What would the outcome be if you edited your life?

If you pruned away the things that are not what God's calling you into?

If you stop doing so many things so that you can actually focus on what God wants you to do, and you can focus on what's important and what's purposeful.

That's what we're going to dig into today.

Welcome to Faith Fueled Living, the podcast that equips you to live well spiritually, emotionally, physically, and purposefully.

Each week, we'll dive into conversations and biblical truths to help you strengthen your faith, pursue meaningful work here for your.

Your whole self, and live in line with what matters most, what happens to our lives when what we keep doing is adding?

We add more, right?

More commitments, more yeses, more things we have to do.

We add more responsibility, we add more obligations.

But how often do we actually edit those things down?

How often do we actually say no to things that maybe don't feel aligned, but we don't take the time to figure it out?

It's much like our homes.

If we keep adding things to our closet, if we keep adding things to our home, at some point it becomes cluttered and unmanageable, hard to maintain.

Well, the same thing is true for both our minds, right?

If we keep cluttering our mind full of ideas and thoughts and different people's voices, and we never make space for silence, space for deciding what's important to us, both our values and what's important to us from a daily life perspective, right?

Like, for instance, is making faith a priority important?

Is our family time a priority?

And important to us is our physical and mental health important to us?

So we have to make time to actually be intentional with how we spend our days and how we spend our mental energy and our actual calendar time.

And so the first thing that I want to share with you is what Bob Goff says in his book I'm Distracted.

And he says, I also love what Bob Goff says, and I've shared this on the podcast before, but he says on Thursdays he quits something every week.

And now maybe you and I don't need to quit something every single Thursday.

The question or the practice is good, which is this.

We are often bombarded with adding more things in.

It could be another show from a streaming service like Netflix.

It could be someone asking us to do another thing at our children's school or at our church.

It could be so many things, or it could just be work is creeping into the margins of our family time and we haven't said no, or we haven't put a boundary in place that allows us to keep that into a reasonable number of hours per day.

Right.

Which will then burn us out, overwhelm us.

And so what I love about the idea of quitting something is how often are you actually auditing and editing your life?

I think at least quarterly, possibly monthly.

We need to take a little bit of time.

It could be 30 minutes, it could be an hour, or it could be a few hours.

And we need to start taking inventory of what are we spending time on and what are our goals and what are our priorities and values.

And where is something just a time suck where we don't either feel that we should still be doing the thing, even if it's a good thing.

And that doesn't mean that we have the time or space or capacity to handle it.

Maybe we know the season has changed where we have other obligations and we really need to let the person or someone know or that it's our time is up, right?

Like we are going to resign from the thing, whatever it might be.

Sometimes it's that we have to be honest with ourselves and say, you know, I really have this dream, this goal for myself, but I haven't carved out time each day or in my week to actually move it forward.

Okay?

So that's the other thing.

But when we start auditing and editing our life, editing our schedules, editing our how we spend our time, where our we.

Where we are absorbing information, then we can start living more intentionally and actually having more peace, okay?

And so there was a devotional that I read.

Let's see, I read it probably in February from the book that I just mentioned last solo episode from Awaken.

And Priscilla is talking about basically a similar idea, right?

About our life.

And that God's going to edit parts of our life even when they seem good and worthy, because it can.

It can derail us, right?

And so one thing that she says that I really like, he says, the divine editor does this very thing with the version of our lives that we each present to him.

Cutting, shaving, dicing, carving, until it communicates most clearly the message he wants to bring out of it and of us.

In other words, if we aren't careful, we can be doing things, but they aren't the things that have been assigned to us, at least for today or this season.

And then she says this, and I really like it.

She says, then he rewrites many busy tasks and frantic religious activities until they look more like solitude, stillness and silence.

My plans for finance and family have also been reworked to include less concern about what kinds of possessions we own, what kinds of clothes we wear, what kinds of image we send off to others.

His rewritten text shows that my loved ones can be comfortable with much less extravagance than I anticipated.

In the last part that she talks about is, She says, I push back against the cuts, these deletions.

But he is kind.

He whispers, daughter, if your story is too full, it will lose its purpose.

Cutting it down will add to its value.

Trust me, I know what I'm doing.

But how many of us complain?

We struggle, we fight the edit, we fight the cutting down, the deletions of the things in our life that look okay, or the people in our lives or the current role we have.

Because God is saying, you have no time to get quiet.

You have no time to be still.

You have no time to renew your mind, your body, your spirit.

You have no time to hear my voice.

You see, if we do too much, then our purpose in the things we're doing, the good things we're doing, they get lost in the shuffle, they get lost in the mix.

It's because when we do too many things, our energy and our effort and our focus is going out and, you know, 10, 50, 100 directions, and therefore we're not moving anything very forward, right?

It's.

It's like these slow little movements, which that could be okay if that's where we're meant to go.

But sometimes we do too many things and we really can't do any one thing well, or we're working on things that won't really.

Aren't really as important, right?

That whole.

What's the real value of the thing we're working on?

Or is it life draining something we've said yes to?

Is it life draining?

Is.

Are we so consumed or worn out because we've said yes to so many things that we don't, like I said, get time to slow down, to have stillness, to get in his word daily, to reconnect with our spouse, to have quality time, even if it's a limited amount, to be with our children.

So we just have to edit our lives.

And like I said, it's great.

Do a life audit every month or every couple months, and then do an edit.

Edit the things that are no longer the place you should be.

Okay?

And I want to share with you Malachi 3 3, which says he will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver so that they may present to the Lord offerings in righteousness.

And recently, on a podcast episode that I recorded, and the episode comes out this, at the end of this month, Pastor Jason Laird is talking about the refiner's fire, right?

And explaining that it's when you put the precious metal into the fire that everything else comes away from the precious metal, right?

The gold.

And so you can't get the pureness of the precious metal until it gets heated in the fire, until it is tested, right?

Until it is.

The things that are not part of the gold are taken away.

In other words, the gold, until it is refined, is not pure.

It is not what God designed because it has these other impurities and these other metals kind of attached to it.

Well, it's the same with us being edited by God, by Him pruning us, and by us learning to have that discernment to prune our lives.

And so it's the same idea.

It's that we're going.

God is trying to prepare us for future assignments, for the calling he has for us, for the dreams he's placed in our heart.

And we can't do those things until we've pruned away the things that aren't necessary or the things that are distracting us or pulling us from our primary priorities, which God's going to have some for us.

And of course, some of those other ones will be, you know, bringing up our families, if we have a family, you know, deepening our relationships with Christ.

But also there's close relationships that we have right in our family, doing purposeful, meaningful work.

And so we have to remember, you know, in Scripture, it talks about that, right, the.

The refining.

But that is to be expected.

And it's not a bad thing.

We can't make space in our lives for something new if we don't edit out some of the things that we've been holding on to.

And this also, I should say this is also true for our, our mental space.

If we're continuously in our head with 50 things on our to do list, not just for today, but in the next month or six months, we don't have space to hear God.

We don't have space to hear him prompting us to go talk to somebody or to offer a hand or whatever it might be.

So we also have to audit and edit our thoughts.

What are we filling our thoughts with?

With what content are we looking at or listening to?

And I'm not saying, oh, don't ever watch whatever show that's not it at all.

It's that if what you're seeing, what you're reading is just keeping you in a state of angst, a fear of worry.

If your to do list is consuming you, then one, edit and audit what you're bringing in, right?

What you're consuming.

But then two, if your thoughts are always distracting you or keeping you there instead of being present, there's a couple things you can do.

One, you can write down your to do list.

Get it out of your head, get it onto paper.

If you have recurring, you know, scripts in your head that keep playing out, maybe they're just negative self talk, whatever it might be, write them down and then find scripture that discounts that, right?

Like if you keep saying something negative about yourself, find scripture that actually reminds you that you are perfectly and beautifully made and that you are capable and that God provides so many promises and blessings to us, like, go and replace it.

But when we write it down, we can pull it out of our head and then we can actually address it.

We can say, how do I want to be more intentional with what I'm thinking about?

How do I want to be more intentional with what I'm consuming, Right?

Like in a, you know, online sense, maybe what you're reading, what channels you're listening to, who you're listening to.

And so once again, this is all related, right?

It's all related to being aware enough and then taking the time to audit how we spend our time, what we're thinking about and then what our priorities are, and then editing down, paring down, pruning down those things.

And also knowing that God's often at work doing those same things in us.

And sometimes it feels hard or difficult or we don't want to let go of some things that God is trying to pull out of our hands or out of our schedules.

But he's doing it for a greater purpose.

He's doing it for something that he's trying to bring forth in your life, either through you or with you or for you to be a part of.

But if you're too busy, you're never going to be present enough to actually participate with Him.

You're not going to get step into your purpose fully if you are not present, if you are not settled enough to hear the voice or the whisper of God, the promptings that he's already.

They're right in front of us.

But often we miss them because we get caught up in the too many, right, the to dos and the I have to's and the obligations, expectations which we're going to have some of those.

I'm not saying that this is about getting rid of all of them, right?

If you're a parent, there's a lot of obligation on you caring for your child, you know, making sure they're safe, feeding them, you know, all these things.

But what we're talking about is where can you.

Where can you make space so that you are not overloaded, overwhelmed and exhausted all the time?

And so I have a free download on my website you can go grab.

You go to KristinFitch.com and I have one of several that might really connect with you today after today's episode.

One is called Create a Life youe Love Journaling workbook.

But it has so many.

It's a really big workbook actually.

There are pages about what is your vision for your future, where do you want to make changes in the different areas of your life like your health or finances?

Where do you want to be more intentional?

What do you want to step into more of what is God calling you into?

What are those dreams?

It has so much and then it has a gratitude pages at the end.

But it is, it's a really comprehensive journal and you can fill out the pages that you want to and you don't have to do it all at one time.

So that's a great one.

I also have a Start with rest.

If you're somebody that's doing too much and you just need a simple place to start.

I have a download called Start with Rest and it's a reflection worksheet on rest and Sabbath that is really powerful.

And then another one that you might really enjoy is called Rewire your mind from negativity to joy.

And that has a lot of really cool simple to use trackers and questions to ask you.

And then it's like I think it's a three or four part way to remi.

Re cannot talk today.

Rewire your mind so that you can shift those thoughts and continue to change that habit or pattern of thinking over time with a couple simple exercises or shifts.

It's really easy if you once you learn kind of those steps.

So go over there, grab that and then you'll also get my Faith Friday emails that I send a couple times a month.

And I would love to encourage you in your email box or your inbox as well.

So definitely go join us and as always, I'd love to hear from you.

So if you want to connect with me, go to my website, send me an email, let me know what you want to hear more of Let me know if you'd like to come join me in the coming year at a retreat either locally on the east coast or further away.

So I can't wait to connect with you and I will see you next time.

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