Eight years ago, about a year after my daughter was born, I was working at a job I loved. I was the chaplain at a mental health facility for young people. The problem was, that the work was so demanding that I often would only see her first thing in the morning or after she had gone to bed when I came home from work.
For years, my wife and I had conflict over the fact that I often came home from work later than planned or picked up extra shifts on holidays. I justified it to myself because my job was so important. When my daughter came along, and I started missing important events and only spending one day a week with her, the urgency of my need for life change hit me. I was missing things I could never get back so that I could work.
No matter how important my work was, my daughter was more important. So, I moved on. Now, I work here in Montana at a church I love, doing work I love. A strange thing has happened. Slowly, over time, urgent matters have begun to take up more of my time, and I can easily spend less time with my family in the name of taking care of important matters at work.
I’m not going anywhere, as my wife and I hope to retire in Big Sandy after raising our children here. Instead, I will need to pay close attention to how I let demands on my time control my schedule. It’s easy to let the urgency of work overtake the urgency of family. This is especially the case because our homes are the place where we rest and relax after working.
When we lose our sense of urgency in regards to our family, it can become easy to just go into automatic pilot. This is most often seen with parents who stop talking to each other or dating each other because work and the kids demand so much time and energy. It’s all too common a thing for couples to send their kids off to college and discover they no longer have anything in common and that their relationship has shriveled up into nothing. This happens when we just stop working at it. If you don’t date your spouse, have conversations, and work on being in love with each other, you run the risk of losing it and simply becoming glorified roommates.
Similar things happen with children when our busy lives keep us from playing with them or talking to them. We can easily find ourselves in a place where they grow apart from us or grow up while we are at work. These are tragic events. Our relationships are the most important part of our lives, but they can easily fall to the wayside in the name of dealing with urgent matters at work or resting after pouring ourselves out completely in our employment.
I have spent years visiting nursing homes and talking with the residents. I have never seen anyone hang up pictures of their office or fellow employees in their rooms. Rather, they hang pictures of their families and tell stories about their relationships over the years. This is because these are the most important parts of life.
We can easily lose sight of this truth because of the urgency of work. For many folks overcoming this tendency involves reminding ourselves on a daily basis that family is the most important thing. Other folks require regular accountability. I am currently reading a book that reminded me of the urgency of my family commitments.
The important thing is to wake up every day remembering our most important priority is with our families. It can be a difficult thing to maintain, but with something so important it’s more than worth the effort.
