Marsha's Musings: I Wonder What It Would Be Like...

I often wonder what it would be like to have a body that works the way it is supposed to all the time, and have energy to burn. Sometimes I am jealous of those who seem to go smoothly through life with no physical challenges to speak of. I see them doing all kinds of fun things with their kids such as camping, hiking and the like. They have their kids in lessons and clubs of all sorts and run from one activity to the next seemingly non-stop.

I wonder if my kids are missing out on important life experiences and feel guilty sometimes that I don't have the energy or extra resources to have them involved in all of these things.

Then I look at our schedule as it already is. It is a top priority with our family to eat lunch and dinner all together and pretty much at the same time of day. Some exceptions occur, but that is not the rule. We generally reserve Monday night for family night. Tuesday afternoon is reserved for sports activities with other homeschool teens. Wednesday afternoon is reserved for my daughter's volunteer job. Wednesday evening is reserved for youth group. I try to reserve Thursday afternoon as my stay at home paperwork/catch up day. Friday morning is my shopping day. Sunday is church. Monday-Thursday mornings are school. How can I realistically add a club or two, another weekly "social" outing, lessons or any other regularly scheduled commitment to the schedule without some other area suffering and adding extra stress to our lives? We have many impromptu outings and those just wouldn't happen if we were scheduled to the hilt. Our family time is far too important to us to let all these good and worthy activities send us in too many different directions, fracturing our regularly scheduled family time and meals together.

I dare say if we add more to our schedule, there would be many fun impromptu activities that would have to be skipped. I have had a hard time getting my household duties attended to as it is, and many more things would get left by the way side if I was committed to taxiing the kids to more regular activities. I know my time with the Lord would suffer. Oh, but wait...if my body worked right and I had energy to boot....I could take all this on....right? I'm not so sure....I'm afraid the busyness would affect my time with the Lord and being able to run the household smoothly even if I did have the energy.

I read a good blog the other day on learning to say no. The writer said that when we say yes to a commitment, we are saying no to other things. So when you are asked to be involved in something or have your kids involved in something, think about this: By saying yes to this commitment, what am I saying no to in our life that I don't really want to say no to? Is the trade off worth it?