Busy

Busy.  The one-word answer to so many questions I get asked anymore.  

“How are you?”

“How are the kids?”

“How’s your hubby?”

“How was your weekend?”

“What does your week look like?”

The answer is always the same.  Busy.  How did we end up here?  Why are we always so busy?  I’ve made excuses for it for years, saying that it is because there are so many of us…of course we’re busy!  How could we not be as we try to juggle 7 different schedules?!?!?  And yet, something about that excuse doesn’t resonate well with me.  I think there is another answer.

We are busy because our world tells us we should be.  Everyone around us is busy doing this, running there…just busy.  Your kids will fall behind if they aren’t involved in activities by age five.  If they ever want to excel at an activity, they must do it, and do it big.  And early.  They should be on traveling teams, and they certainly should plan to play several sports in school, too.  They should go to camps, and clinics, and trainings.  They should go to organized workouts and they should have a trainer.  They should have private lessons and tutors and coaches for everything from piano to academics.  They should have voice coaches and acting coaches and music teachers.  They should have a staff, for crying out loud!  They are sure to miss out if they don’t.  

But, I have to wonder, have any of us stopped to ask the question, miss out on what?!?!?  What are our children going to miss out on if we buck this system and just say no?   What happens if we raise our children to believe there is more to life than being on the team, more to life than nailing the audition, more to life than being “the best?”  Because, have any of us ever stopped to think about the fact that we cannot ALL raise “the best?”  You see, the world of average has become a myth.  None of us want our child to be average, and so we have erased average.  We tell ALL our children they are the best, and if they aren’t, then they feel like the worst, but there is no middle.  No average.  We push our children’s teachers to award grades that they really didn’t earn because we ALL want 4.0 students.  We ALL want valedictorians and class presidents and all-star athletes.  We expect our children to be handed things, whether they deserve those things or not, because we just KNOW they will miss out if they are not.  But, still, the question remains, miss out on what?

The truth is, according to the NCAA, about 2% of high school athletes will be offered a college scholarship to play sports.  2%.  TWO percent.  That means, if a high school class of 250 has about 100 students playing high school sports across all possible sports, 2 will actually be offered a scholarship.  Two.  Is this what we think they will miss out on?  A 1 in 50 chance of being offered an athletic scholarship???  And, let’s just assume your child really IS the best, and they are 1 in 50 and are offered a college scholarship. What then?  They play college sports, risking injury that they will deal with for a lifetime, and when their four or five years are up, they have a college degree.  Just like many of their classmates who did not receive a scholarship offer.  Maybe or maybe not with less debt, but still…is this really the thing that we covet for our children?  Surely most of us don’t operate under an illusion that our children will end up being professional athletes, because those numbers are laughable, really.  Because of those two athletes that were offered a scholarship, less than one half of one of them have any chance of being drafted professionally.  I’m taking that one off the table as a possible reason for this insanity because I just have to believe we are all a little more realistic than that.

So, assuming our motivating factor is not an expectation that our child will become a professional athlete, or even that he/she will go to college on an athletic scholarship, what’s left?  What are we pushing so hard for?  Why do we think this rabid pace we push ourselves and our children at is a good thing?  What are we so afraid they will miss out on?

I have to wonder if it isn’t a combination of things really….some are wholly focused on recreating their own high school experience.  Many more are wholly focused on creating a DIFFERENT reality for their children than they themselves experienced, even if genetics suggest that if you were not a high school athlete, it is likely your child does not have the genetic makeup for that, either.  And still others are just caught up in the current.  Caught up in thinking that if everyone else is doing it, it must be the right thing to do, right?  I mean, that many people just can’t be wrong, can they?

And so it goes.  We continue to live our lives on this treadmill that seems to go faster and steeper and longer and higher every day.  We become obsessed with what we aren’t doing for our children that we should be doing.  What are we missing?  What more is there?  We obsess and we discuss and we plan.  We center our calendars, our schedules, our lives around our children’s activities and we think we are doing the right thing.  At the end of the day, though, I think we are wrong.  I think when we send the message to our children that their activities are worthy of centering our lives around, we elevate those activities to an importance that they should never have.  We tell our children, without any words, that their achievements hold more value than the substance of their character.  We place expectations on our children that they can never live up to and we leave them feeling incompetent, unworthy, and less than.  And when they don’t make the team, they don’t get the part, they don’t win the competition, they don’t get an A, they believe they have failed.  But really, it is we who have failed.  We have failed to do the one job that really should not be negotiable for any parent.  The job of raising our children to BE who God intended them to be.  The job of teaching our children that their value, their worth comes from the work they do to grow God’s kingdom.  The job of teaching our children that being given something you do not deserve simply because your parents travel in the right social circles or because it has been purchased for you through the right camp attendance or the private coach sessions does not make you a better person.  But standing up for what you know is right, standing up for those who cannot stand up for themselves, and being a shining light for Christ does.  That, my friends, is what we need to do…we need to BE that for our children.  Stand up for ourselves, stand up for our children, and BE a shining light for Christ as we make choices for our families and choices for our children that do not succumb to the pressures of this world, but that are driven by the direction of the One who knows what we really need.  It won’t be easy.  It won’t be something we can accomplish overnight, but I believe we can do it.  One family at a time, we can jump off the treadmill.  We can take back our lives.  And we can let our children know that being a winner does not matter.  Because it doesn’t.  But being a leader, a beacon, a light…that is everything.   In our house, we have worked hard to teach our children that the content of their character is what matters to us most, but we have fallen into many traps of over-scheduling and over-doing, and my prayer today is that those traps we have fallen into have not, and will not, overpower the message we have tried to send.  We believe in the worth of each of our children as a child of God above all else, and we need to work to mold our actions, our calendars, our priorities to match that belief.  Because at the end of the day, I have always said, and I truly believe, I am not raising Olympic athletes or Rhodes scholars.  I am raising human beings.  And if I do nothing else right in this world, I want to raise human beings who see ALL others as human beings worthy of love, respect, and honor.  That is all.