The Bondage Of Busy~ness

life~going so fast it's a blur!

Back when we started our family, I found myself wishing we had more to do in our lives.  Many of our family members and friends were going from committee meetings to sporting events to music lessons to dance class.  We had one small child with another on the way.  We were home every evening and we felt like we were missing out on something.  Fast forward a few years.  Hubby was on our church council along with a couple of other committee's at church.  He was also working at his landscape business which he did on the side of his full time job!  I was involved in our school's parent organization, our church's worship team, and on the steering team of a MOPS group just starting out in our community.  At this time I was working part time outside the home.  We were also in the process of an adoption.   Between hubby and myself, we had meetings several nights a week, sometimes we both had a meeting on the same night.  We were getting stressed out.  We soon realized that we definitely had NOT missed out on something earlier in our lives, but we were absolutely missing out now!

We realized that this was not the way we wanted to raise our children.  As soon as hubby's term ended on church council, we made a drastic change.  We quit all outside activities.  Hubby left the committee's at church.  We evaluated the landscape business as well and decided that while hubby still wanted to keep his hands in landscaping, he would end the business.  I left all of my outside activities as well.    We needed to be home for our kiddo's.

I recently heard someone refer to busyness as the "bondage of busyness".  This is so true.  When I have to look at the calendar before making any decisions, I am slave to this busyness.  When we are trying to decide which child's sporting event to go to because they are both on the same night, we are slave to this busyness.  It takes our eyes off of what is really important in our lives.

We came up with a solution for our family in this area.  Whenever someone wants to be involved in something, we ask ourselves a few questions.  How will it affect the family?  Are you using the gifts and talents God blessed you with?  Will it make a lasting difference in your life?  It's not that we can't be involved in outside activities, we just realize that we want our family together as much as possible.  As we are finding out with our oldest child, we only have them with us for a short time!  We do not want to spend this short time running from event to event, rarely seeing one another, only to colapse into bed each night exhausted.

There will always be groups or events that are worthy of our time.  We just have to set our priorities with the season of life that we're in.  And we need to realize that even though society tells us otherwise, it is OK to say NO!

Blessings,