Hurry! Come on! I said “let’s go” 3 times already!
Think for a moment. Have you said some version of this today? If not, did you say it yesterday, or even the day before on Thanksgiving perhaps? Did you need to usher your child(ren) quickly out of the bathroom, into their clothes, out of the door, into or out of the car, from one house to another? Any of those…or maybe all of those?
Please tell me it wasn’t just me!
I gave myself an exercise recently (not the kind to benefit my body – I need to get back to that, really), a kind of mental exercise. I took notice of how often I was rushing my children…literally PUSHING them through life. Recently, we were frantically scurrying out of the house, loading all 4 kids into the car to go to 3 different schools, all by 8am so that I could make that 8:30 conference call for work. I had honestly probably said some version of “hurry” no less than 10 times that morning, and more than half of those times was likely in a voice filled with frustration, discouragement, discontentment…possibly desperation.
As I helped his tiny body up into the car, fussing for him to “hurry up and buckle your belt”, my four year old stopped me in my tracks.
He has a most precious voice. He looked at me with one of his quirky, curious faces that everyone who knows him can picture, and he said “Why? Why do we have to hurry, hurry, hurry every day?“.
He was right. Why? Why do we feel such a constant pressure to seemingly rush our tiny humans through every aspect of every single day? If you are like me, maybe you make a conscious effort not to do this, only to realize at night, (when I am sure you replay the imperfect moments of the day in your mind, wondering and praying about how to do better tomorrow – how to be better tomorrow) – that you actually still said HURRY many more times than you meant to or realized in the moment.
We live in such a rushed world, don’t we? Not only is life so heavy for you momma (see previous post), but it is often moving at a speed that we can barely keep up with. Are we overscheduling our little ones, in hopes of preparing them for life? More sports practices to make them faster/better, more tutoring lessons in reading or math to make them smarter, more camps to make them more whatever-er?
What if we changed it up? What if we wrote in our beautiful Erin Condren’s or Passion Planners appointments for REST. What if the Google Calendar app on our phone reminded us about appointments for PLAY? Appointments for FAMILY TIME? Can you imagine? Would our kids really be less successful in life – or would they be more balanced, happy…less anxious (future post coming soon on this one, friends!)? How could we benefit?
What I do know is this. I still say “hurry up”. I haven’t found any secret to removing this from my vocabulary. I say it more than I want to, probably still much more than I should. But, when I do, I try to take a mental note about the situation and think about how we can avoid having to say it tomorrow in the same scenario. Do I need to wake up a bit earlier, be a bit more organized, be a lot less overscheduled? I think about the following verse that really speaks to me in this season of life:
Desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way. Proverbs 19:2
So, I take the mental note and try to live in that imperfect moment, the best I can…even if I am doing my make-up at the red light and grabbing breakfast from a drive through, in a hurry.
Can you relate?