This past weekend, our family took a trip to see my in-laws (“Grandma and Pampa”, as the kids call them). Friday was our day to pack and prepare for the trip, and when we do, even the kids help by packing some of their own things. I was working on one particular task when Jessica came into the room pulling her suitcase, which appeared stuffed to the gills.
“I finished packing my stuffed animals,” she said. “But now I don’t have any room for my clothes.”
“You have to pack your clothes first,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, turning to eye the suitcase as if trying to figure out how she could make both clothes and stuffed animals fit in there.
I didn’t blame her for wanting to fill her suitcase full of twenty or thirty of her favorite stuffed friends. As a child, I loved my stuffed animals too. The only problem was that stuffed animals can’t be allowed to take the place of clothes to wear.
You and I sometimes find ourselves in a situation similar to Jessica’s. We’ve filled our lives with good things, maybe even very good things, and that’s fine. But what’s not fine is when we allow the good things to crowd out the truly essential things.
We find time for soccer practice and Facebook, but we don’t find time for a daily time spent with God. Or we have time for our friends or favorite leisure pursuits, but we don’t have time to go to church on a regular basis.
In other words, we prioritize earthly things over cultivating our relationship with God.
Those earthly things may seem more urgent, but they usually aren’t. What could be more urgent than our connection to God? Yet we put virtually everything else in front of it, and things like a daily quiet time get pushed to the side, if they even happen at all.
But if we’re too busy to have a regular time with your Creator, we’re just plain too busy. When our plate is overloaded, something may have to give. But that something shouldn’t be our intimacy with God.
True, we may have to be creative in scheduling time to develop our relationship with Him. There will be days when we have to take time with Him where we can get it. But unless you and I make time spent with Him a priority, it’s probably not going to happen.
Moms, let’s get our priorities straight. Let’s not stuff our lives so full of the non-essentials or seeming essentials that we have no time left for what is truly essential. Let’s get first things first—and then, in the time that’s left over, we can schedule all those other things.
Let’s not let other things, even good ones, stuff our suitcases so full that there’s no room left for what we really need.
Psalm 73:25—Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. (NIV)