There is a school secretary I used to know who had a great sign posted at her desk. The sign said, "Lack of organization or preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."I love that. I have used it many times in many different situations. It’s not a bad parenting line...partly because it allows for the law of natural consequences. (Just because you’ve put off your science fair project to the last weekend does not have to mean that I will spend every waking minute–-as well as those minutes that I should be asleep--running down weird plants and plant food or the supplies to make a spouting volcano. Lack of organization or preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Or how about the frantic phone call that you get because someone left their homework/notebook/gym shoes at home and will you bring it to them?) Please know, however, that I have participated in all of those kinds of things.
I am especially reminded of it whenever I allow something "urgent" to get in the way of the "important" things I need to be doing. There’s a certain amount of that kind of stuff that will happen in the normal course of the day. And then I can get back to what I need to be doing. What I’m talking about is being side-tracked by something or someone that seems urgent so that I take my focus off of what I am supposed to be doing or what I need to be doing. Then when I am held accountable for the "important" stuff, my only defense is that I was tending to someone or something that someone felt was a crisis, and I guess I felt I was the only someone who could tend to it.
I've known folks who lived their lives doing whatever they felt like doing at the time, being (as Eugene Peterson put it in The Message) a "slave to [their] whims." If you read People Magazine (I know, I know...I really just look at it when I'm at the beauty shop) you see example after example of folks caught on film who are slaves to their whims, to the point where in some cases it costs them their lives. I know I can’t be the only one to look at that stuff and think who could live that kind of life on a regular basis? I can only guess that the person living life that way sees it as a "normal" life. Yikes.
Part of doing the right thing and of making good decisions lies in being able to prioritize the important from the urgent. (See, Major, I was listening during the Boundaries workshop...) While I enjoy independence in decision-making, it is still important to me that there is a standard through which I run my decisions.
I’m pretty sure that God would support the sign at the school secretary’s desk.
- Sheree Yasko Hill
