Hard Decisions
Every day I’m trying to figure out ideas and solutions in my world. Mental wrestling, thinking, figuring... This week I have been doing these mental gymnastics with our upcoming summer plans. We get to this point in the year, when summer is a few months away and then all of a sudden we are inundated with options for those precious summer months ahead. Family vacations, band camp, football camp, ballet.
Our daughter earned a spot at a national public speaking tournament. This is quite an accomplishment and very exciting. It is a week long national conference and will include lots of beneficial workshops and incredible speakers. But it’s six days long, in a state over a thousand miles away and if we take her on this excursion it wouldn’t be just her, i would be her chaperone and we would also want to take our son for him to take part... and before we know it, it’s turned into a monumental ordeal. It starts to become a heavy weight instead of a welcome opportunity.
But the truth is we’re afraid to let it go at the same time. What if this opportunity is the thing that brings some great revelation to this child and catapults her into her life’s purpose? We have done so many of these extreme things for our older children and they have become incredible adults. What if we stop and find that those were the keys to making them exceptional? But what if the opposite is true. What if we stop and find out that something more beneficial was there waiting if we let the other thing go? What if in actuality we have been robbing our family all along but pushing ourselves too hard and we don’t even know it.
So I guess what I am coming to is this....I’m wondering if the things that we should hold to in our commitments in our family’s life would be the things that “fit”. The things that must be forced should be let go in trust that living a “lighter” life will bring blessings that are so much better. At the same time we are afraid of what we might lose if we let go of all these pressing “opportunities”, we are probably robbing ourselves of treasures that are hidden in choosing the simpler things.
Is your family like ours... does this time of year and this process start to make you claustrophobic? Isn’t summer supposed to be a more relaxed time of year? It’s a whole different world than it was a generation ago. The days of summer can be more relaxed that’s true, but there are so many trips and travels, it keeps you in an endless state of “recovery mode” from June to September as you vacillate between family vacation and kids camps and other “opportunities”. Nowadays there is not only family summer vacations, today every extra-curricular program has a camp of it’s own; ballet camp, soccer camp, scout camp, band camp, science camp... sports training for the fall athletic season. And there’s bible camp, you don’t want to not to that. That should your first priority, right.
How should we navigate these decisions? It’s true some of those opportunities are priceless and they will be life changing but we have to choose wisely and sparingly. If we are to have an invaluable family experience, we have to have margin. I realized looking at the possibilities that were quickly filling our summer months that the long awaited father-son trip for our teenager was not going to fit if we chose all these other things. There would not be time, energy or finances for it. The father-son trip plus many other simple family summertime pleasures like saturday picnics would be squeezed out by all of these other things. There won’t be time for days spent at the beach or kids having long days of the summer to pour themselves into their passions. Too may minutes will be spent planning or paying for the next event or recovering from the last one. Run, run, run, constant stimulation, exhaustion .... emptiness.
Our children might miss some things. But I think we have some challenging, courageous decisions to make and I think if those hard decisions, in the end, we may have some amazing stories to tell of the treasures that we discovered by letting go.