It happens to us all. We think we are doing something routine like grocery shopping. On a good day I can get in and out of the grocery store in a few minutes. It never fails though. If my day is packed with so much I have little wiggle room, I will run into everyone I haven’t seen for years in the store. And they want to talk. A lot. About everything that has happened in the five years since I last saw them.
Now while I am normally a friendly talker, when my thirty minute grocery store run takes twice as long on a day when I have no free time, I get stressed. Something has to be dropped or shortened in order to complete the day. What gets cut?
For many of us, the first thing that goes is our quiet time, our prayer time or our Bible reading for the day. If you have kids and have tried to do family devos, you probably know exactly what I mean. You can generally make it for a few days and then life goes crazy and the devos get dropped.
Strangely, science has studied this phenomenon (okay not the devo part). They found just about everyone has accepted a planning fallacy – that they can accurately predict how long it will take to complete a certain task. What they found is basically everyone underestimates how long a task will take – often by quite a large margin.
Since God is often what gets pushed off of our plates when we run short on time, how can we compensate for the planning fallacy and put Him back in our lives and the lives of our children?
Full disclosure. I am pretty sure I feel physical pain when my child is hurting. Sometimes the hardest part of parenting is watching your child get hurt – physically, mentally, emotionally and especially spiritually. Your natural instinct is to rush in and do whatever you can to immediately stop the pain your child is feeling. Unfortunately, that is not what is always best for your child.
A trip to Monticello as a young girl led me to years of fascination with Thomas Jefferson. In the elementary education version of his life, Jefferson was a hero. A man who not only penned the Declaration of Independence, became President of the United States and greatly increased the size of our country, but also was well read, an inventor and travelled to places I dreamed of seeing. I wrote many a paper in my school years about his life.
Those shows featuring British nannies with lovely accents drive me crazy. If you have never seen one, the episode usually begin with a family whose children are totally out-of-control. The parents have evidently never heard of rules or consequences. In swoops expert nanny, who basically spends the remainder of the hour teaching the children and their parents how to make and enforce rules. The show usually ends with Nanny riding off into the sunset leaving behind a now nearly perfect family. (It can’t be truly perfect unless she had lived with them forever of course!)
Some older friends of mine experienced something interesting a few years ago. They were asked by women in their twenties and thirties to do a Bible study which also taught them how to cook. They had been so busy with school and activities during their years at home; no one had taught them how to cook. While it created an outreach opportunity for my friends, Christian parents may want to seriously consider teaching their children as many practical skills as possible.