How we spend our time

Find it difficult to be involved with your family? The first step to achieve balance in this area may be to value the goal.

I have written about this before. (See my personal post on the subject; scan down to my discussion about Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.”)

I really struggle with spending time with the grandkids. Especially when they are as young as mine are right now.

I think, no question, I struggled–and still struggle–with spending time, even, with my adult kids. As I confess in the post to which I directed you, above: When the kids (and grandkids) come over, “I often find myself ‘apart’ from the family, kind of ‘doing my thing,’ yet feeling drawn to–guilty, even, because I’m not involved in–their conversations.”

All this by way of introduction to something I read the other day in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. (Ecclesiastes is the same book from which Pete Seeger got his inspiration for the song The Byrds made famous: Turn, Turn, Turn.)

Here’s what I read:

There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil. If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.
–Ecclesiates 6:1-3; ESV

Same basic message, it seems to me, as something Solomon wrote a few chapters earlier:

I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.
–Ecclesiates 2:18-19; ESV

And I thought: “To the extent it is in my power to achieve this thing, let me not permit ‘the man who will come after me’ to be a fool! . . . I must invest my time in my kids. Let me not be a Cat’s in the Cradle kind of dad, all preoccupied by my work! Let me be involved in my kids’ lives!”

–What better inheritance or legacy can I leave my children than that they spent time with their dad?

All the rest–all the time I spend on “work,” whatever that work may be–truly is a “striving after the wind” if my own children and grandchildren . . . and their children and grandchildren after them . . . grow up to be fools.

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