Hey friends! I’ve got something so simple for you today that I’m calling Intentional Bracelets. It’s literally nothing new or that’s never been done (if you’ve ever been to camp, I’m pretty positive you’ve made a bead bracelet). Earlier this week I wrote about the concept of simplicity and this whole Season of Simplicity that I feel I’m being called to. As I’ve been researching what I feel God is trying to tell me and etc., I found that I was already overcomplicating it. LOLZ because I’m doing the opposite of what I’m supposed to be!
Anyway, as I’ve been looking into simplicity, the Fruits of the Spirit verses keep popping up. I know I explained that I feel November as the best month for the Fruits of the Spirit, but now I feel it goes hand in hand with simplicity. If you’ve never read the verse or heard of the Fruits of the Spirit, it goes:
Galatians 5:22-23 New Living Translation
22 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control.
I’ve been asking for clarity on the Season of Simplicity and already I feel that it’s been slowly all coming to me, starting with the Fruits of the Spirit. These 9 fruits are not necessarily anything that I’ve ever intentionally asked for or sought after. They’ve always just been more of afterthoughts than actual fruits in my mind, but recently they’ve taken on new life. So much of our teaching to our children is about being loving and kind, learning how to be patient and exercising self-control. These truly are just basic simple but powerful/foundational teachings and fruits that grow in us, but we lose sight of them so easily.
To be honest, I didn’t actually even know all the fruits. Oops. But since I’ve decided to do the simple task of asking the Holy Spirit to grow these fruits in me, I figured I’d better learn them all. ENTER BRACELETS! Earlier this year I took a class where we meditated and made these intentional bracelets. I loved it! Of course, the intentions were a little different and we focused a lot more on the energy each bead brought buuuuut I think that there’s no need for that here lol.
I decided to do the simple task of making intentional bracelets with beads to represent each Fruit of the Spirit to remind me and help me memorize them.
To do this you just need to pick out at least 9 different kinds of beads, some stretchy bracelet string, and the optional small spacer beads.
After that, it’s pretty easy! Pick your combinations and string them on. I went with what I felt each color could represent to better help me.
Bracelet Combos:
- Love and Joy
First off, love and joy. Love for the pinkish and joy for the white. I always feel that joy is such a pure reaction in us so white made perfect sense. (Beads are: white opaque glass and Quartz).
2. Peace, Patience, Kindness
I chose the blue bead as peace, clear as patience, and green as kindness. (Beads are: Dark Blue Lapis, clear glass bead, and Green Aventurine)
3. Goodness and Faithfulness
I really felt that the wood beads could be goodness- doesn’t that just work to you? I don’t know why it clicked so much lol. And the dark red ones made sense for faithfulness since it has to be a deepness to faithfulness. (Beads are: wood beads, dyed red Aventurine).
4. Gentleness and Self-Control
This is my favorite bracelet not only because I just really like the colors but because I feel that the thing I struggle with the most is on this bracelet— self-control. I chose the beautiful tiger eye for the gentleness since I just love how the colors mix in a gentle way. And then I chose the lava beads for self-control. I love that they are lava beads because they make me think of Guatemala- and honestly, how hard it was for me and self-control while I was there.
And that’s it!
I don’t intend to wear all of them at once because a) the colors are all quite different but also b) I want to focus slowly on the fruits and really think about the ones I wear that day.
Like I said up top- there’s nothing new under the sun and the act of using some physical something (like beads) to represent something else is ancient! But it works! And that’s why we keep doing it- to add intention to something. You can literally choose to do this with any intentions you want to set!
This month I’m intentionally focusing on keeping it simple and exploring each of the Fruits of the Spirit.
Thanks for reading, friends… I think it’s gonna be good 🙂
[…] last Fruit to explore is the fruit of Self-Control, dun-dun-duuuun. When I first made the Intentional Bead Bracelets to represent the fruits, I knew that self-control was the one that I’d identify with the […]