Those Moments That Bring Life Into Sharp Focus

It’s easy to let life slip by us, isn’t it?  I know I’m guilty (too guilty) of finding time to play on Facebook or Twitter, but “forgetting” to do an activity that I told the kids I would do.  Or, I grumble when my Mom asks a favor while I think I am too busy doing something that probably isn’t all that important anyway.

I think that there are so many of us that find ourselves caught up in life, but not in the important things — those things that, if we knew we would die tomorrow, we would wish we had focused on more.  Probably very few (hopefully none of us) would say, “Wow — I wish I had been more active on my blog.”  Instead, I suspect many of us would cite things like our families, our friends, or our church, for example.

Every so often though, something happens that brings life into sharp focus.  You have a sudden clear vision of exactly what is important, and also of what really isn’t all that important.  It has been my experience that it usually happens a moment, and it’s not something that you expected.

It’s something like when we were driving to an All Saints Party in November, and I got the cell phone call from my Mom that started like this, “Dad is at Grandma’s house, and he thinks she may have died.  I’m on my way there now.”

I vowed that I wanted to bring more focus to my life after that.  But, it’s so easy to forget about that once things start to settle.  This seems especially true because those kinds of moments don’t usually happen to someone often.  It would seem that I had another one of those moments less than a week ago.  (It doesn’t seem right to have them happen so close to each other.)

Let me tell you, while the unexpected death of your 90 year old Grandmother puts a focus on your life, seeing a pediatric cardiologist who is normally jovial walk into a room after “checking some measurements against the normal range” with a serious look and a deep breath, life gets a whole lot more focused.  Then, when words like aortic aneurysm are said as the doctor looks from you to your eight year old child, the priorities in your life become, in an instant, crystal clear.  

I think that over our Christmas break, I need to make some plans to help me live so that my true priorities really come through in my life.  I know all too well that once life settles, it’s easy to forget that sharp focus.  But I also know that I need more of it.

If anyone has some great tips of how to manage your time or how to work on priorities, I would really appreciate it!

(I don’t really want to get into a lot of medical details right now, but I also don’t want anyone reading to worry that we are looking at anything life threatening right now.  Although we’ll have to worry about things a lot sooner than we once thought, we’re still fine enough for now.)

photo by ToniVC

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