Thoughts on Slowing down the pace of life

Fasten your seatbelts, this will be long. I have been pondering and praying over this topic for several months now, and have also been reading a wonderful book on this topic titled, Breathe, creating space for God in a hectic life (see sidebar for author).

There are actually several related elements that have all globbed together in my mind under this general topic. How do I create margin in my life? From where do I obtain my value? (from the things I do?) How does overcrowding my life create stress? And how does stress manifest itself in my life? How do I do it all? And by "all" I don't mean the the kind of all that has become associated with being a supermom, I mean quite literally all of the things I have committed to and all of the tasks that are required of me on a daily basis.

I will say right now that I don't know all the answers to these questions. I know that I am learning, though. I am working through many of these issues and slowly finding the "how" of creating space in my life and the life of our family. I have a long way to go!

The author of Breathe asserts that our culture is one that is focused on doing. I agree with this. Once we become parents it seems to become worse. We take our children to music lessons, karate, soccer, ballet, youth group or Awana, group music classes when they are toddlers or preschoolers. There is tremendous pressure to be sure our children are doing everything they "should" be doing, and having every opportunity they can possibly have to become well rounded individuals. Those of you with children, you know the drill! I made a conscious decision last spring to not do any fall sports. It was a HARD decision and one I felt I had no support for, but it was absolutely the right thing to do. When everything else was starting up this fall, we did not have the added stress of twice weekly practices (times 3 kids) and 3 back to back soccer games every Saturday. Do my kids miss soccer? Yes. Will they be warped because they didn't get to play this fall? No.

I have adopted a cost/benefit paradigm for deciding what activities we will be involved in. Every activity or commitment has both a cost and a benefit. If the benefit outweighs the cost, we are more likely to do it. If the cost outweighs the benefit then it's an easier "no". Going to Wed night programs at our church costs us on Thursday mornings, and costs me on those nights when I must get 5 little people to where they need to be on time by myself, but the benefit of regular Scripture memory is great enough that it's worth the cost. Going to homeschool co-op on Fridays costs me a great deal of time in preparation for my classes and means we lose that day for our regular school work, but the benefit of learning from other adults, making friends, my children knowing they are not the only ones who are homeschooled, and me getting to teach in a classroom setting for a little bit every week is worth the cost.

I am also learning to think in terms of what is best for our FAMILY, and not necessarily for the individual. One of our sons has wanted to learn karate for as long as he can remember, and I'm fairly certain that it would be something he would thrive at, but the cost TO OUR FAMILY (and our pocketbook) dictates that we not add another activity at this time. It is hard to say "no" to my children when they have a legitimate desire for a good activity. It's hard to break out of that mindset that says I am depriving them of a worthwhile experience. But it's not enough to just break out of that mindset without replacing it with "right thinking". I am striving to think rightly about all of this, and I believe that the "right thinking" I need to apply here is that it is of greater value to all of the individuals in our family if we have TIME to be together as a family, playing games, going to the park, visiting museums and other attractions, watching movies, laughing and being silly, sharing our thoughts with each other. When we overschedule to the point that we have no downtime with each other, no chances to just hang out as a family with all the family members present, we are ultimately hurting ourselves.

My heart knows this is right, and even my head knows this is right. But virtually no-where else do I hear this message. There is precious little encouragement for families to proactively plan their lives in such a way as to allow for unplanned time. Sometimes I feel that I am bucking the system, and this gets tiresome because I am already bucking the system in other ways. But I know this is right for us. Please pray for me to stay the course! I know it will get even harder as our children get older, but my prayer is that as we live our lives in this way, our children will get on board with this concept and appreciate it for themselves.

This is already long, but I want to share a few other thoughts along these same lines. I am a do-er by nature. I have always loved to do lists. I have even been known to write something on my to-do list after the fact just so that I could cross it off because it had already been done! (there's my slightly obsessive-compulsive side showing!) So it's hard for me to "do nothing." I'm a slow learner, but thank the Lord I *am* learning that those times that appear to be "unproductive" are actually producing wonderful times of connection, with God, or with family. The author of Breathe goes into this in quite a bit of detail and it was a real encouragement to me.

Something else she says in the book is that "getting enough sleep is one way of keeping enough margin in our lives." Wow. This is powerful for me! If you know me, you know that getting enough sleep has been a challenge all my adult life (for some reason it didn't seem to be a problem when I was a kid!). So this is something I plan to keep working on.

Another of her wonderful quotes that I just love is, "ruthlessly eliminate hurry." Just think on that for a moment. Isn't that good? For those of you in the same stage of life as me, with children still young enough to need lots of help and/or supervision when getting ready to go somewhere.....isn't this powerful?? How many times have I yelled at the kids and tried to make them go as fast as I can when we are leaving the house to go somewhere? Yikes. Too many. My new plan has been to BEGIN getting ready to go long before I previously thought I had to. Then we are not rushed. I am not yelling. I am not stressed. And we are on time! It has taken lots of failures to learn exactly how much time is needed to get ready to go to certain places. But now I know. And I am working diligently on this.

My last thought on this topic (finally!) is that it's important for me to keep the right goal in mind. The ultimate goal is not just to eliminate hurry and stress and activities from our schedule. It is the flip side of that equation....to intentionally ADD IN times of doing nothing, of being together without having to go somewhere. So that I can truly focus on and connect with my husband and our precious children. Aren't they the ones I treasure above all else? This idea works wonderfully in my time with God too. Rather than approaching my devotional time with the mindset that I must read x number of verses or chapters today, I want to simply enter God's presence and BE with Him. Bask in His awesomeness, revel in His goodness and faithfulness, soak up all the strength and grace I need for the day just by being in His presence. Again, I have a long way to go, but I'm loving this learning process!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on slowing down the pace of life, too.