PERSISTENT PERSEVERANCE

As usual, the work week begins about dawn Monday. Very little flex time is built into the schedule of showering, dressing, eating, getting the kids ready, and heading out the door. From then on, most of the day is spent on the run. The kids are taken to school and errands are run and work is done around the house or the yard until the very minute you have to get the kids from school. Or else you battle the traffic to work where you make it just at starting time and plug away relentlessly until the hour when you join the quitting queue on the road again.

Once home, often after a hasty, but necessary stop or two on the way, you find it’s more and more common to shove a meal in the microwave while you hurriedly change clothes for your evening responsibilities. One or two nights a week it’s a school-related function with the kids. Another night might find the entire family at a midweek service at church. Still another night holds a committee responsibility for someone. Next, throw in an occasional night of working late or doing work at home, work-related travel, or work around the house. Don’t forget the nights of bill paying, checkbook balancing, homework helping, community involvement, classes, hobbies, and socializing.

Complicating all this may come the pressures of single parenting, family conflict, illness, job stress, a second job, financial tension, and so on.

Sound familiar? Is your life a testimony to the surveys that tell us—despite all our labor-saving devices and technological advancements—leisure time has decreased dramatically in the last generation?