Accelerated Chaos

We sent Sammy off to his second year of preschool today. He was so excited. He had a great day. He is my noisy one, so the house was very quiet with him gone this morning. It was just the two little ones for 2 1/2 hours. Very strange. I did enjoy the time I could spend with just the two of them. I'm looking forward to getting to know them better, without their older siblings around to answer for them and do everything for them.

Life seems to be accelerating for us. One in Kindergarten, one will go next year, and the third will be in preschool next year. There will be some mornings when I will only have one child. That will be strange. My sister-in-law's favorite quote "These are the longest days, and the shortest years." Very true.

Even now we find it hard to slow things down to spend time with each other. It takes a conscious effort to have times where there is nothing planned for us to do. Matt and I would like to be minimalist, hard to do when you have four kids, but we do our best, especially when it comes to activities. We want our children involved in things, and we know it will get crazy someday, but we still want to keep extras to a minimum.

A slower paced lifestyle is more important to us. Time to spend together, with other family and friends. Time to rejuvenate and refresh ourselves. We don't need to have something planned every minute of the day.

Having this motivation in life makes living in this world very hard. While the rest of the world tries to bury the emptiness it feels in doing, we find ourselves being cut off from the One person that fills that emptiness. What a deception Satan has painted for out culture. He blinds us to the emptiness. He promotes an accelerated lifestyle to hid the emptiness. If our eyes could be opened to see how empty things really are. If we could slow down enough to find the One who can fill the emptiness, the peace that would spread through each individual person is amazing. Many love to quote it, but rarely do it, "Take time to stop and smell the roses." or better yet, "Take time to stop."