Busy schedules, a busy family life, and an overflowing mind. Sound familiar?
To this day, it is still often a struggle for me to bring some structure to my weekly schedule and balance to all my ‘obligations.’ I love structure and routine, and I had this for years: a fixed schedule, time for relaxation, family, and God, groceries, exercise, homework, my job, and cleaning my house. I had a fixed day and time for everything. Overview! I-LOVE-IT!
But over the years, that structure vanished like snow in the sun. A lot has changed in the past two years; not only did I meet my husband, we got engaged and married that very same year! Understandable, of course, that my structure and planning completely disappeared, but you would think that almost two years later I would have found some balance again in my new life as a wife, but unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
It was still a struggle to manage my time effectively. In my head, I was chronically short on time, and in my opinion, God could have made a few more hours in a day, LOL.
“There is a time for everything,and a season for every activity under the heavens” - Ecclesiastes 3:1
But God wouldn’t be God if He didn’t have a set time for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1), so even in my illogical and messy weekly schedule, there is a time for everything; I just forgot to involve God in this, LOL.
Until that one evening when I discussed this struggle with my husband. He came up with all sorts of options to help me with my weekly schedule and also came up with good ideas, but it still wasn’t quite to my liking (sorry, babe 😉); in my head, I was still running out of time, or my workload was too big… anyway, we couldn’t figure it out.
Breakthrough
The next morning, I was on my way to work; the journey there is always a moment for me to worship God. Just twenty minutes to pour out my heart to the Father before my workday begins, and I brought this to His feet as well. What I didn’t know is that just moments before, my husband had brought me and my source of irritation—my weekly schedule—before His throne and prayed for wisdom for me.
Arriving at work, I parked my car, and suddenly the idea popped into my head to schedule one task for another day… I quickly grabbed my phone and jotted it down in notes: “What if, instead of doing my weekly groceries on that day, I did them on this day…?” I hadn’t even finished typing it out when one idea after another popped into my head! “If I do this on that day, then I can do that in the afternoon, and I’ll do this on that morning and that on that day, and then I’ll take two hours for this, and I’ll set aside so much time for that.” In no time at all, I was looking at a weekly schedule where I actually had time left over in the week instead of being structurally short! “How is this possible! I must have forgotten a task. Did I overlook something?” I couldn’t figure it out!
Suddenly, I knew! I had asked God to help me!
How could I forget! All this time I had been struggling and being frustrated on my own, when I could have simply asked my Father for help!
Not only that, it made me realize that there is a time and a pace for everything. In times like these, in a world like this, we are easily inclined to rush, passing by so many beautiful moments.
God is a God of peace and not of chaos. In this way, we may—and I am speaking mainly to myself here LOL—learn to resume our activities from that peace.
Time for reflection
Do you, like me, struggle to find a good balance between all the tasks, activities, and responsibilities, while still finding time for some relaxation? If so, I would like to encourage you to bring this to your Father in prayer and ask Him to help you create a good weekly schedule.
And not only that, but ask yourself the following:
- Are you following the pace of the world, or are you following the pace of God?
- Do you move from a place of busyness and let your life be dictated by what happens, or do you move from a place of rest and wait for what God brings your way?
And what about the balance of your time management in your life, and what can you learn from Ecclesiastes?
I want to challenge you, and also myself, LOL, to be less focused on our schedules and everything we still have to do, but to take a moment every day to pause and reflect on the valuable, meaningful moments that God gives us in our lives.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
– Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
