Making Room for Life: Trading Chaotic Lifestyles for Connected Relationships

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This book will help you finally let go. Hours of Sudoku puzzles to enjoy! Makes a perfect gift for birthdays, holidays, or just to relax. The Mindful Life Journal: Want to unlock deeper intimacy with your partner?

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Are you tired of people telling you to get out more and behave more like an extrovert? The Simple Guide to Feeling Better. We all suffer in varying degrees. This book offers immediate solutions that do not require change in the people around us, or our life circumstance. Discover how to unleash unlimited motivation and feel empowered to create health, happiness, and abundance.

Start turning negativity into positivity. Tired of dating for fun? If you're ready to find a great guy you can build something meaningful with, this book is for you! Walking in the Supernatural: Another Cup of Spiritual Java. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention room for life making room small group randy frazee every night make room years ago hebrew day highly recommend read this book day planner work done eat dinner children under age dinner together parents of two children hours a week kids play see people recommend this book.

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. This book covers concepts of prioritizing relationships, fostering a connected family and working efficiently. It is an expanded dissertation on working to live rather than living to work. My favorite take-away is this: Build friendships with your immediate neighbors. Since life typically gets in the way between us and our usual circles of friends, and distance and travel contribute to the difficulty of regular visits with each other, the book challenges us to look around us and create a proximity-enhanced circle of relationships.

The immediate neighbors come to mind - but in order to deepen the relationships from the perfunctory Hi's and Hello's, meals need to be shared, shared life struggles need to be fought and stories need to be exchanged. One key suggestion was to gather at alternating host family homes at least once a week, and to have a shared meal together the suggestion was for soup. I really enjoyed the challenge and have started to do this with my neighbors. I look forward to deepening my friendships with them, and treat them like extended family.

That way we can share more memories together, and make room for a shared life. One person found this helpful. We over schedule our lives, our spouses and our kids and then wonder why we are struggling in our homes. We have poor communication, poor eating habits, and we dont know what to do to enjoy our families.

We spend our days in our cars rushing from work or school to activities that last late into the evenings. We eat non-nutritious food in our cars leading us to obesity and disease such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Then get home in time to scream at the kids to get their homework done before bed when they actually are exhausted.

Who has energy to complete a project after music and soccer practice? When does the house get clean and when do the kids learn to clean or cook or balance a bank account? When do you sit down at the table to eat a healthy balanced meal and enjoy family conversation? That is what the book is about. Great theories and makes a definite impact on how our culture even Christians have gravitated away from home. However, like his other book "The Connected Church", it is quite urban-based in philosophy. He feels we should be connected and fellowship with our neighborhood.

Alright if you have 20 families in a square block or whatever. Most of his arguments and advice have the ring of truth to them. His view of church seems a bit strange to me. The problems with this way of thinking are multiple. If Christian community is only going to exist in the neighborhood, how am I going to develop meaningful relationships with people who are not like me, whether racially, culturally, or socioeconomically. I attend a church where home groups are the primary focus… but those home groups connect and interact on Sunday mornings, as well as other times.

This seems like a bad model for close-knit Christian community… all for the sake of not having to drive 10 minutes away. Again, I get it. Having a good portion of your Christian community within a 1-mile radius is great, and should be striven for. His chapters on work are a big weakness in my opinion. He spends almost no time discussing blue-collar work, which means a significant portion of people reading this book will have minimal means of applying much of his advice. I found this book compelling and convicting, on the whole.

I appreciate that kind of candor - and it is good advice for a book like this. I think this is an important book to aid us in simplifying our lives and learning how to prioritize what is truly important, rather than just going with the flow of our frenetic culture. May 22, Ken Peters rated it it was ok. I was given this book ten years ago, and should have read it ten years ago when my kids were younger! Even though I found a fair bit of the book either inapplicable to my situation or unendorsable as a premise eg- no work happening in the evenings , I was challenged by the emphasis of making sure one made room in their schedule for, and made a priority of, meaningful relationships with family, neighbours and church.

The book strongly encourages investing in community in a way that minimizes how I was given this book ten years ago, and should have read it ten years ago when my kids were younger! The book strongly encourages investing in community in a way that minimizes how many unrelated circles of friends we're involved in, and in a way that mixes our friendships as much as possible with our pursuits of various other things like work, recreation, neighbourhood and church.

A worthy ideal, but not always possible. In fact, too much of what I found in this book just seemed highly impractical or totally unattainable. May 03, Michael Mack rated it liked it Shelves: Randy Frazee is correct. We do need to make room for life. In a culture that is individualistic, narcissistic, and pragmatic, the great need of our time is to return to the relational life we were meant to live--the life God created us to live, the kind of relational life that brings about life transformation and allows us to live the Abundant Life.

For calling the church back to that life, I applaud Frazee, but I do not believe his solution is necessarily relevant or realistic today. Other revi Randy Frazee is correct. Other reviews do a good job of outlining the book, so I'll resist the urge to do more of that here. Yes, we need to be counter-cultural--maybe even revolutionary--from our society in our our approach to life.

But the ancient Hebrew Day Calendar is, I believe, simply archaic. What worked well 2, years ago may very well be outmoded and obsolete today. Also, I see it as a simplistic, pragmatic solution, rather than a vision for a new way to look at life. When I first read Making Room for Life when it was first published several years ago, I liked it's main message, and I made some changes in my life to live out the values Frazee advances, for instance sitting in our front yard more so that I can connect and build community in our neighborhood.

I went to hear him speak on this three separate times, and sat there nodding my head in agreement each time. His vision is all good stuff, but he spends a lot of time advocating the Hebrew Day Calendar, which, while thought-provoking, left me perplexed and frustrated with trying to implement it. As a small group pastor, I'm passionate to see people in my church connect in what I call "radically real relationships" in Christian community.

But I also know that almost everything in our culture creates huge barriers for people to actually live this way. The 1 excuse for not being in a small group is busyness. And yet, according to the A. In a year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube. It seems people would rather watch people living relationally than actually living that way themselves.

Perhaps it's safer for them that way. Yes, I desperately want to see people connect in community, but I know that I need to offer them more than simplistic, archaic, programmatic solutions. They need to change their attitudes first. Boren references Making Room for Life in his book, and even borrows one of Frazee's illustrations to make a vital point. Frazee also wrote one of the two Forewords for Boren's book.

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But to me, The Relational Way provides much more practical theology, relevancy, and real-world insights. Check out my review of Boren's book. Mar 20, Angela rated it liked it. I wish so badly I could give this a 5 star rating because I think reading the book would be a great exercise in thinking for every American family. It has become my opinion over the past decade or so that the pace at which we live life is actually destructive. Seems odd if you're filling your life with God-centered activities, but I speak from exp I wish so badly I could give this a 5 star rating because I think reading the book would be a great exercise in thinking for every American family.

That being said, I wish so badly that I could recommend this book without reservation, but it has 2 major flaws from my point of view: If I don't agree with the author on what the problem is, then how can I determine if his proposed solution might work to fix the problem?

Here's what I CAN say for the book. And in this way, I give it 5-stars. Chapters 7ish to 10ish are right on the money. We do not understand what we're sacrificing when we set a pace of life like most of us have. This section is less about solutions and more about opening our eyes to what we're missing as well as to what we could be building instead. Even if this is all you read of the book, these chapters are food for serious thought - no matter what stage of life you are but especially I'd recommend this to people beginning a family or with small children because we have a window of opportunity here to set the culture of our families before we're so far down a road that it makes it so much harder to turn the ship around.

Making Room for Life: Trading Chaotic Lifestyles for Connected Relationships - eBook

Jan 11, Megan rated it liked it Shelves: This book was somewhat helpful to me for giving me a timeline of when I should get work done and when I should relax and build relationships. I really like the Hebrew Day Planner schedule because it will definitely work for my family, but I don't think it will work for everyone.

In many ways, we are already on this schedule work from 6 to 6, dinner and relationships from , but a few tweaks he discussed are helpful, like eating in the dining room.

In chapter eleven, he mentioned how we should bring our church lives home more, and since we have a missional community that meets in our home though is not made up of people from our immediate neighborhood we kind of meet that criteria. This book has spurred me to get to know my neighbors more because they are just right there, friendships practically waiting to happen. It would also be nice to have some case studies of how other families made the transition to this lifestyle and how they specifically trouble-shoot issues. I think it would also have been nice to acknowledge the different seasons of life where this Hebrew Day Planner just will not work.

For example, if you have an infant, all timing is off. Besides these issues, I did enjoy this quick read for how to do less so we can live more abundantly. Feb 08, Catherine Gillespie rated it really liked it Shelves: Trading Chaotic Lifestyles for Connected Relationships to absolutely anyone. This book will not only give you a lot to think about and talk over, it will also give you tools to think through how you want your life to be and how to realistically evaluate your schedule and priorities to create space for actually living in your life.

We have linear friendships rather than connected friendships—most people know one facet of who we are, but very few know the whole story of who we are, which leads to loneliness, anxiety, and a general sense that something is off balance. The solution, Frazee believes, is to establish boundaries in the way we devote our time, and establish habits of connection.

He advocates limiting your work to the hours of 6am-6pm, and leaving the hours of 6pmpm for real dinners, conversation, and community. Feb 18, Tim rated it really liked it. As such it is less theological and more self-help, relying on medicine and sociology and personal example. Roots and Fruits of Christian Hospitality. And Loving Others as Yourself - eBook. Dysfunctional families and disconnected, stressed-out lifestyles are the "norm" in today's congregations.

Can the church serve as a meaningful Christian community in such an environment? Frazee says yes and offers biblical solutions. Learn how we as believers can radically reinvent our lives to include more time for deeper relationships with fewer people. Max Lucado , Randy Frazee. Healing the Child Within: Love, Sex, and Relationships Dean Sherman. Families are often overwhelmed with activities that cause high levels of stress. Relationships with others as well as family time are often neglected.

The purpose of this book is to enjoy the simple pleasures of life while existing in a busy, fast-paced culture. Frazee stresses the importance of family time, friendships, and relaxation, by pointing to related passages in the Scriptures. Frazee tackles the importance of community with others, how to restructure relationships and value time, and how to raise children in a way that lets relish childhood.

His writing is clear, well organized, and easy to follow.

Making Room for Life: Trading Chaotic Lifestyles for Connected Relationships by Randy Frazee

Each chapter contains discussion questions for small groups, and space is provided for personal responses to the topics. Worth, Texas, and the author of two previous books. The first situation Frazee analyzes is crowded loneliness. Although people are constantly surrounded by others, they still can feel lonely because they have not formed solid relationships. It is also important to raise children in a way that lets them enjoy their youth.

He emphasizes that children should not be involved in every activity offered to them.

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