Have you ever had to fight a fire? Once when I was working out on a ranch in Western Nebraska, I smelled smoke coming up the hill to the house after finishing the evening's chores. When I mentioned it to my employers, we immediately dropped everything, jumped into the pickup and tried to find the source of the smoke. We drove up on the top of one line of hills to the north of the house. Nothing. Then we drove up on top of the line of hills to the south. Nothing. Finally, we gave up and headed home. On the way home, we realized that we'd burned a huge pile of weeds earlier in the day. That's what I'd smelled. I'd just forgotten that they could still be smoldering. I felt silly, but that's the immediacy of a potential fire. You drop everything to deal with it.
Somehow that's what my life feels like right now. I'm overcommitted. I've said yes to too many things. That's unfortunate, because when you feel like you have too many things to do, the tasks you do accomplish don't feel like they've been done as well as they could have been done.
This is not a new problem for me. I remember writing a letter to my great-grandmother when I was in college, telling her that I needed an extra hour in the day to get everything done. She responded by telling me that I'd just soon fill that hour up too.
Ron Dart, of CEM, once gave a sermon at the Feast of Tabernacles in 1992 in which he talked about the fast pace of our lives. He suggested that the Israelites on their way out of Egypt could only take what they could carry. He recommended laying our lives out on the floor around us, metaphorically speaking, pick up God first. Then pick up whatever we could carry and then catch up with the rest of the group. That means I can't pick up too much because I'll never be able to keep up with the rest of the group.
I think the same principle applies in my home life. If I have picked up more than I can carry, then I don't have time for the things that my children need which weren't originally scheduled into my day. Kids get sick. They get splinters. They lose their shoes. They have bad dreams and just need an extra dose of attention. Sometimes the projects they are working on need some adult assistance - and more than the hour I'd originally planned to spend! But I know God has given these children to me. They are the job that I specifically know He's given into my care. All of the other things I've picked up, they are preferences, desires, likes - but they don't fall into the same caregory as my children and they can't come first.
I need to spend some time thinking about ways to cut back on being overcommitted. It's not fair to my children, especially if I'm grouchy because I'm stressed. In a word, I need to find another career - God never called me to be a fire-fighter.
Selah!
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