At With Love, one of our most common mottos is “keep the ball rolling.” When we say this, we mean that no matter what the obstacle or level of activity going on with the project currently, we are committed to always making progress on the project at some level. This is important, because projects that aren’t constantly moving forward tend to stagnate. Without the expectation of delivering something valuable week after week, people can get demoralized whenever the a hard obstacle or slow waiting period hits.

Every week without fail, our team meets up to discuss the new progress we have made and discuss tasks for the upcoming week. This ensures that even when there doesn’t seem to be much happening, we never get complacent. The truth is that there is always something more that can be done, always another avenue of interest to explore, always another opportunity to make use of.

Every once in a while, our team holds a strategy sessions where we evaluate the current objectives we hope to achieve, then we give each objective a priority level. These meetings help us re-center on our goal and serve as a guide about where we need to be concentrating our efforts. Conversely, it also helps us identify lower priority tasks so that we can conserve energy and channel it toward the most pressing concerns.

During one slow season of the project, I challenged each of my team members to have one “big thing” accomplished by the next time we met. Not only did it help shift the mentality from maintaining what we had achieved already to creating new things and making new pushes, it also yielded great results: a new partnership with an existing like-minded organization as well as the creation of another sharing event to spread the vision of With Love.

Of course, keeping the ball rolling doesn’t eliminate the importance of rest. I have been fortunate recently to begin having a regular weekly day to sabbath and help me re-center on God’s purposes for this business and my life. Consistent rest also has practical value: it allows us to take a breath of fresh air and return to old problems with a new perspective. To detach ourselves from the noise of life and of our overstimulated brains, allowing for an unusual time of simply listening and receiving from our Father in heaven. Rejuvenating rest is just as important as work for helping a project move forward.

Regular meetings, strategy sessions, weekly challenges, and consistent rest: these are all things we do to make sure With Love Community Market and Cafe continues to move forward. An interesting thing we’ve come to realize is that often, when we are faithfully pressing on with our daily and weekly to-do list, we find that God is right there next to us, rewarding our obedience by opening doors and giving us opportunities we could not have gained on our own. Divine teamwork! Let’s keeping pressing forward, wisely and faithfully!