Is Your Family’s Schedule Overwhelmed?

I’ve got a riddle for you. “You can spend it, but you can’t keep it. And once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.” Do you know what it is? Here’s a clue:

Let’s say you win a contest. The grand prize is $86,400 wired into your bank account each day at midnight. The money is yours to spend however you want. There’s just one catch. At the end of the day, every penny you don’t spend disappears from your account. Gone. Forever.

My guess is losing that money would bother you at first. But, eventually, you’d think, “Eh, it’s no big deal. There’ll be another $86,000 in there at midnight.” With so much new money available to you, you’d stop caring about the thousands you were losing.

Sound crazy? The reality is many people behave that way right now, except it’s not thousands of dollars that are disappearing. It’s time – the answer to the riddle I posed. Each day we get 86,400 seconds to spend. But at the end of the day, they’re gone.

Which begs a deeper question: How often have you spent your days running from one thing to the next, but feel like you’re not really accomplishing anything worthwhile? It’s a challenge we all face: not simply how to fill the seconds of our days, but how to fill them with meaning and purpose.

It’s easy to become a “checklist Christian,” marking things off our to-do list and rushing through our day to keep all the plates spinning. Yet, too often we leave the Lord behind, forgetting to invite God to do life with us that day.

An overwhelmed schedule equals an underwhelmed soul. That’s why today we’re beginning a two-day program, “Finding Balance in Your Life and Family,” that I believe can provide practical tips that’ll help you gain control over your schedule instead of allowing your schedule to control you.

I hope you’ll tune in to your local radio station. Or you can also listen any time online or via our free, downloadable mobile phone app. Each new day is a grand prize of life’s most precious resource. Do we really understand how priceless those moments are? Are we spending them wisely?

Topics: Family and Home Tags: faith, family, parenting January 13, 2015 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura