Priorities
11/08/13 05:22
I don’t intend for this blog to be a confessional, but I have been aware of some of my failings lately. Yesterday I wrote about my tendency to start more projects than I can finish, my tendency to keep too many things and my lack of housekeeping skills. After working on our church’s firewood project in the afternoon, I was doing some weeding in the garden and was asking myself why I let things like that get ahead of me. If I had kept up with the weeding, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal to sort out the weeds from the plants I want to keep. Having to compete with the weeds isn’t good for my garden plants and a short time once a week would make a big difference. After all I find time to do other things, like paddle my canoes and read books.
Even though I have some disorganized parts of my life, it is not that I am a totally disorganized person. I can be well organized in areas that are important to me. I do a lot of advance planning for worship and coordinate a relatively complex worship team each week. I choose hymns weeks and even months in advance and although there is always a need for flexibility in worship, our services are well planned and the work is organized. I can bee organized when it is important.
Then, the answer came to me as I was sitting in my garden pulling weeds. It wasn’t a flash of revelation from God, though I am sure that God does speak to some people as they work in their gardens. It was the sound my phone makes when I receive a text message. The message was a simple request, a part of a conversation that I had been having with the individual earlier. I responded. That prompted another text or two and soon I was contemplating a minor change for today’s worship service. I was still sitting in my garden with muddy feet and dirty hands, but my mind was focusing on they dynamics of keeping a worship service flowing without having the entire service run over and take too much time.
The answer is not that I am inherently a disorganized person. It is that I have priorities. The truth is that in my life worship is more important than my garden. The people in my church are more important than having a clean garage. Engaging in hands on mission and serving those in need is more important than finishing the projects that I have started. That is just the way that things are.
It is an important lesson to consider when I look at others. I can be a bit judgmental when I don’t understand someone else. I notice when people don’t attend church and when they don’t have any time for volunteer activities. What I fail to do is to ask myself about what else is going on in their lives. We all have priorities and others arrange their lives in different patterns than I. Since I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is the same, I have to learn to accept and understand that others have different priorities. After all, someone who doesn’t volunteer much in the church may be volunteering a lot in some other organization. A person whose church attendance is rather spotty may be working two jobs to keep a family fed and provide a home.
It doesn’t take too much time visiting the home of our son and daughter in law to know that having small children in the home quickly rearranges your priorities. By comparison, Susan and I have a lot more time for our personal projects. When you have a young child the needs of that child must be placed above other projects and demands. As we have traveled this life journey, there have been many different phases to our lives. When we first married, we were both full-time students. Completing our educations had to be our highest priority. It couldn’t be our only priority. I still had to work to make ends meet, but I was willing to do all sorts of different pick up jobs such as being a janitor, working in a commercial bakery, working in a library and refinishing furniture because they were a means to an end that was important. After school, we were establishing our careers and then children came into our lives. We became homeowners for the first time about a dozen years after we were married. That created a new set of priorities. The years passed and our children were thinking of their own college careers and sorting out their relationships with others. They weren’t launched all at once. There were some brief returns to live at home while they sorted out their lives. Then we focused our attention on providing care for our parents in their aging years.
Now we are real empty nesters and we find ourselves with a really big nest. The things that we are sorting and dealing with are not all of our own making. Our children have a few things stored in our home. We have an excess of furniture and boxes of family items that need to be sorted because our parents didn’t complete the task of sorting in their lives. One room in our house is filled with items that came from our parents’ homes and need to be carefully sorted. We laugh as we try to identify the strangers in an old photograph and when we can’t we still don’t know whether the photo should be kept. Perhaps it is really valuable to another member of the family. But who?
Some priorities are carefully and methodically established. Others come into our lives by chance. Just living means deciding what is most important at any given moment. More often than not, we “muddle” through life’s busiest times and simply respond to the most urgent crisis. Having made it to the edge of the years some might call “senior” is an opportunity to look back and forward and to re-align priorities. I probably won’t have the cleanest garage in the neighborhood and the weeds will still get ahead of me.
But instead of feeling bad about the situation, I can remind myself that there are things in life that are more important.
Then, the answer came to me as I was sitting in my garden pulling weeds. It wasn’t a flash of revelation from God, though I am sure that God does speak to some people as they work in their gardens. It was the sound my phone makes when I receive a text message. The message was a simple request, a part of a conversation that I had been having with the individual earlier. I responded. That prompted another text or two and soon I was contemplating a minor change for today’s worship service. I was still sitting in my garden with muddy feet and dirty hands, but my mind was focusing on they dynamics of keeping a worship service flowing without having the entire service run over and take too much time.
The answer is not that I am inherently a disorganized person. It is that I have priorities. The truth is that in my life worship is more important than my garden. The people in my church are more important than having a clean garage. Engaging in hands on mission and serving those in need is more important than finishing the projects that I have started. That is just the way that things are.
It is an important lesson to consider when I look at others. I can be a bit judgmental when I don’t understand someone else. I notice when people don’t attend church and when they don’t have any time for volunteer activities. What I fail to do is to ask myself about what else is going on in their lives. We all have priorities and others arrange their lives in different patterns than I. Since I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is the same, I have to learn to accept and understand that others have different priorities. After all, someone who doesn’t volunteer much in the church may be volunteering a lot in some other organization. A person whose church attendance is rather spotty may be working two jobs to keep a family fed and provide a home.
It doesn’t take too much time visiting the home of our son and daughter in law to know that having small children in the home quickly rearranges your priorities. By comparison, Susan and I have a lot more time for our personal projects. When you have a young child the needs of that child must be placed above other projects and demands. As we have traveled this life journey, there have been many different phases to our lives. When we first married, we were both full-time students. Completing our educations had to be our highest priority. It couldn’t be our only priority. I still had to work to make ends meet, but I was willing to do all sorts of different pick up jobs such as being a janitor, working in a commercial bakery, working in a library and refinishing furniture because they were a means to an end that was important. After school, we were establishing our careers and then children came into our lives. We became homeowners for the first time about a dozen years after we were married. That created a new set of priorities. The years passed and our children were thinking of their own college careers and sorting out their relationships with others. They weren’t launched all at once. There were some brief returns to live at home while they sorted out their lives. Then we focused our attention on providing care for our parents in their aging years.
Now we are real empty nesters and we find ourselves with a really big nest. The things that we are sorting and dealing with are not all of our own making. Our children have a few things stored in our home. We have an excess of furniture and boxes of family items that need to be sorted because our parents didn’t complete the task of sorting in their lives. One room in our house is filled with items that came from our parents’ homes and need to be carefully sorted. We laugh as we try to identify the strangers in an old photograph and when we can’t we still don’t know whether the photo should be kept. Perhaps it is really valuable to another member of the family. But who?
Some priorities are carefully and methodically established. Others come into our lives by chance. Just living means deciding what is most important at any given moment. More often than not, we “muddle” through life’s busiest times and simply respond to the most urgent crisis. Having made it to the edge of the years some might call “senior” is an opportunity to look back and forward and to re-align priorities. I probably won’t have the cleanest garage in the neighborhood and the weeds will still get ahead of me.
But instead of feeling bad about the situation, I can remind myself that there are things in life that are more important.