Finding Your Sacred Rhythms | The Rule of Life Series, Pt. 6

Forget rigid religious routines and spiritual guilt trips! This episode is your permission slip to ditch the pressure and rediscover spiritual growth as a rhythm of grace. Michele Kus flips the script on spiritual disciplines, showing how a Rule of Life isn’t a religious blueprint or straitjacket but a Spirit-led canvas where grace gets to breathe, change, and grow with you. 

Drawing from her own journey (including the evolution of this podcast!), Michele invites you to reimagine spiritual practices as flexible, life-giving rhythms that ebb and flow with your real life — not some idealized version of it. If you’ve ever felt stuck, tired, burned out, or boxed in by your spiritual “shoulds,” this episode is for you. Tune in, take a breath, and let grace lead. 

Today’s Reflection Questions:

• Am I holding my Rule of Life like a blueprint to control or a rhythm to enjoy?
• What’s one part of my current rhythm that feels a little too rigid — and might need space to breathe a little more?

Chapters

• 0:00 Happy Friday!
• 1:48 Today's Kus Word
• 3:36 Adapting Spiritual Rhythms to Life's Seasons
• 5:17 Reflection Questions

Transcript

Michele: 0:00

It's Friday, May 9th, and this is Today's Kus Word. It's Friday, fam, and you know what that means! Time to light the fuse and drop another fresh freedom bomb. This is your spiritual growth coach, Michele Kus, dropping in with your weekly Kus Word to inspire you, challenge you, and throw some Miracle Grow on your soul. Hello, okay, I don't know if this is going to be a weekly show, an every day during the week show, or an every third day show. I'm still trying to figure out a rhythm for this show that works for my life. So thank you for joining me on that exciting adventure.

Michele: 0:49

And just to get you caught up, if you haven't been following along with the episodes, we've been talking about spiritual growth the last few episodes. We've been talking about how proximity to the truth does not guarantee our transformation and how time alone doesn't mature us, and we talked about creating sacred space, time alone with God. And then I gave you an AI episode. No, that was not me narrating on the last episode. I do not have that good of a voice. I wish I did, but I actually was not feeling very well. So I just fired up the AI narrator and she gave you the episode on the Rule of Life and how that's like a trellis, which is like a supportive structure helping you grow in the right direction. So we're going to continue in that theme today with Today's Kus Word, which is your Rule of Life isn't a cage, it's a canvas. So we talked last episode. Well, my narrator, my AI narrator, talked about how a Rule of Life is not a spiritual to-do list, but we talked about how it's a rhythm of grace. It's not this list of religious chores, but it's a rhythm of grace. It's a rhythm that you need to have working for you. And I want to go a little bit deeper about this, because it's just not something we talk about very much in the Christian world.

Michele: 2:29

And your rule of life if you have one, or maybe you're thinking about crafting one it's not something that you need to get just right. It's not something you need to perfect. It's kind of like this podcast you kind of mold it and shape it and work with it as you go and it might change over time and it's something you participate in. So you're not creating this spiritual blueprint that you have to stick with and that you're going to be graded on or something that's going to set some of you free. You're not going to be tested on this. It's just a tool. It's really just a tool for you. It's not about control, but it's just about helping you stay clear on the things that are most important to you. So you're sketching out this kind of sacred rhythm in your life that helps you stay rooted and grounded and connected with what is most important to you.

Michele: 3:28

And the thing is it's not carved in stone, so you can think of this like wet cement. It's something that's going to change over time. It's not rigid. It's really flexible, it's adaptable, it's alive and breathing. It can bend, depending on the season that you're in. It can breathe depending on your, your schedule, your life, your commitments. So it's something that you want to work for you.

Michele: 3:55

It's almost like how, when Jesus said that Sabbath was made for man, not man for Sabbath, right? So the rule of life is for you. It's something that's supposed to work for you. Really you can adapt. It's just an ongoing conversation between you and the Holy Spirit on what's working for you in this season. So it's really about just being really present with God, being in communication with Him and having that adaptability. So instead of asking yourself what is the perfect rule of life, you can ask yourself what's giving me life in this season of my life? And it's okay to have things in your life in this season that maybe aren't life-giving to you the way they once were. So it's very possible that you have done something in your life that was really life-giving for a season and it might not be so much anymore, and that's perfectly okay. So you can just ask the Lord, hey, what helps me stay rooted and grounded in you and in grace? And just let the Spirit lead you with curiosity. There's no condemnation or anything like that. So that's basically what I got for you today, and I have a couple of reflection questions that you can think about. I'll put these down in the show notes if you want to see them written out. The first question that you can ask yourself is: Am I holding my rule of life like a blueprint to control or a rhythm to enjoy? So, like I said, this is something that is meant to be enjoyable, flexible, and if it's becoming too controlling, too rigid in your life, you might want to rethink it. And then the next question is: What's one part of my current rhythm that feels a little too rigid? Maybe there's something that might need some space to breathe a little bit more. So I'll give you an example.

Michele: 6:09

When I first launched or I should say relaunched this podcast, my goal was to do five minutes a day, five days a week. And, if you listen to some of the older episodes, that's what I said in the intro, this is Today's Kus Word your five minutes a day, five days a week, spiritual freedom bomb. I don't even know what I said, but I thought it's going to be super doable. It's only five minutes a day. Well, it turned out.

Michele: 6:36

Doing, trying to do that in the beginning overtook my life. I wasn't able to engage with the rest of my life the way that I wanted to, and it was taking a ton of time. So I had to scale it way back and say, okay, well, I'm going to do it once a week. And then those episodes got to be really long, and then I thought, well, maybe I'll just do it like a few times a week and make them shorter. And I'm still kind of trying to figure out where I'm going to land with this. I'm not going to quit, but it's wet cement. So and that's what your rule of life can be too it can be wet cement.

Michele: 7:12

It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to have it all figured out before you start. You can just sort of go and see what works for you. Maybe reading 10 minutes of scripture every morning is working for you, maybe it isn't. Maybe you need to read it at night. Maybe you need to listen to it in headphones. Maybe you just pray at night. Maybe you take a lunch break walk and that's when you spend time with God, play around with it, play around with all of this stuff. It's okay to spiritually experiment and see what works between you and God and, like I said, it might change depending on the season that you're in too. So if you have a bunch of little kids that you need to get ready for school in the morning, maybe you can't do a 20-minute Bible study in the morning. Maybe it's something that needs to wait until they're in bed.

Michele: 8:03

You get what I'm saying. All right, so let me pray for us. Holy Spirit, I give you my rhythms, my plans, I give you all my perfectionistic tendencies, and I ask you to teach me to hold my habits with an open hand, and let this rule of life that we're talking about this week reflect freedom and not control or rigidness. Let it reflect curiosity, flexibility and grace over grind. And Lord, would you shape us all, everybody listening and myself included. Just shape us gently, help us see the beauty of your presence in the process of all of this. We lift you up. We love you. It's in the mighty beautiful name of Jesus I pray. Amen. And that is what I got for you today.

Michele: 9:00

My friend, if you liked it, send me a text message. There's a link down in the show notes that says Text Michele, just tap that link on your phone and send me a text message. Sorry guys, it only works in the United States and Canada. I found that out. So if you're in a country other than the United States and Canada, the text messaging doesn't work yet. Sorry about that, but if you are in the US or Canada, you are free to text the show. It's a one-way text message so I can't text you back, unfortunately, but I would love to know your biggest takeaway and what you think of these episodes and if there's anything in particular you'd like me to cover on this show, send that in your text message as well.

Michele: 9:48

I will take requests. I am a DJ. That's kind of one of my side gigs. So I thought you know what? As a DJ, it's always nice to take requests from people, and as a podcaster, it's probably equally nice to take requests from listeners. So if you have a request of a topic you want me to cover, send it over in a text message. I would love to hear it and until next time, have a great day. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers, mamas, spiritual mamas, aunts, grandmas. You know who you are. Have a wonderful Mother's Day and I will see you next time.