It snowed in my corner of the world this week. Enough for about an inch or so to stick on the ground. There was no snow when my kids went to bed one night and then the next morning the ground was covered. Oh how excited they were. Much to their dismay, it wasn’t enough to call off school.
I was taking my youngest to his school and listening to him marvel at the fresh snow and how he sure hoped it would still be there when he got home. As he was telling me this, he stopped cold and realized that he had already made himself plans to play something else and maybe, possibly, go to a neighbor kid’s house to do that. Just as quickly, he remembered that Daddy had purchased the new Disney Plus streaming service and fresh TV would be available for his viewing pleasure.
“Mommy, I have so much to do I don’t know how I’m going to decide,” he said. Well that IS a tough call. If you’re just desperate to know how it turned out, he chose a little of all three options and not a lot of any of them.
That conversation has been stuck in my brain. I was thinking about something along those same lines when he started talking about it. See, I was spending the same day volunteering at his school. I had been wondering how I was going to have time to get my various tasks done, fix dinner, get them to and from after school activities. At the core, I’ve really been thinking about priorities.
Life is short. I have a finite amount of time. It doesn’t matter how smart, kind, rich or poor I happen to be or how much stuff I accumulate. I cannot change the time. I can, however, change how I spend it. I don’t want to spend it being so busy that I’m too exhausted to enjoy it. It’s a little too close to the law of diminishing returns for me. My energy invested goes up and the benefits go down. If I give everything the same importance, then actually nothing is important.
I love sports and always have. In my late teenage years in particular, I was in a stretch at one time where I was playing softball for my high school and then for two other league teams in two different towns plus another team that traveled to different weekend tournaments. I was playing constantly. There were a couple times where I played three games, for three different teams, in three different towns on the same day. That was the perfect scheduling alignment for me.
My mom disagreed. I could drive myself up and down the road to all those games so she just let me and drastically reduced her appearance at any of them for a while. She said I was playing so many games that none of them mattered. My eye-rolling teenage self just blew her off and continued on to my games. The much older and wiser me now understands what she was saying.
I would like to believe that I gave my maximum effort in all of those games, but the reality is that I probably wasn’t capable of that when I was spreading myself so thin. I didn’t take time to reflect on the wins, losses or my performances because I didn’t have it. I was on to the next game as fast as humanly possibly – changing uniforms in the car on the way down the road.
It just so happens that many of us, and that definitely includes me, are doing a version of this same thing in our daily lives. We’re filling our schedules and our kids’ schedules so full of things that we’re losing some of the value. I don’t think that God wants us to live that busy. I think He wants us to spend more time on fewer things with greater value.
Personally, I’ve been trying to make sure that He’s at the top of my value list. I’m far too guilty of making Him fight or wait for my attention. I’m also guilty of making the people most important to me fight for my real attention. My children for example. I want to do lots of things with my kids but I have to be careful not to over do it. I don’t have to fill a whole childhood in one year or one holiday season. When I drag them from one activity and event to the next without giving any of us down time to rest and recover, we get tired, cranky and don’t appreciate any of it.
That’s when I become the version of myself that Mom was trying to warn me about all those years ago. I think that’s the version of me that God is trying to warn me about when He reminds me to rest and to be still. I’m afraid that my kids will just remember a tried and grumpy Mom instead of the wonderful experiences I’m trying to give them. It’s well intended but missing the mark.
I pray that all of us are willing to slow down and value our time, not just during a holiday season, but for life. Let’s prioritize, do a few things wholeheartedly and then allow ourselves time for rest. That’s how we can truly appreciate our limited time. That’s how we can give God, our spouses, our children and our most important people, the best version of ourselves. And when we can give the best version of ourselves, we get the best results.
