The really most important thing

“Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.” __Yogi Berra

*****

I noticed in my journal from a year ago that Sonja and I had a rather heated conversation. 

This time last year I was guiding one of the churches under my care through the process of obtaining a new pastor. At the same time, Sonja and I were in South Carolina for a family vacation to spend time with our children and grandchildren. (To give a little context, because of Covid, we had not seen our son and his family in over two years.)

The contention that Sonja and I had was my plans to cut my vacation time short with the family and fly back to take a pastoral preference vote.  Sonja did not approve at all!

My justification for doing this was that appointing pastors is one of those few things that only I can do (one of those 5% responsibilities I recently wrote about in my blog: What only you can do).  I ended up following through, cutting my vacation short.

This morning as I read about that it dawned on me that a year later I don’t even live in North Dakota!  But I am still the husband, dad, and papa to my family.

I stand by my 5% rule that appointing pastors is one of few things that only I can do at this season of my life, but in the pressure of the moment I failed to take into account that being husband, dad, and papa to my family was also in the 5% of those things that only I can do and for that particular week being husband, dad, and papa was even more important than appointing pastors. 

Turns out Sonja was right (as she so often is).

I must confess that I have made that error far too many times over the course of my life. I plan to live and learn from that experience but unfortunately I don’t have as much time to live or learn as I used too.  But hopefully you can learn from my mistake and not miss precious moments and waste priceless opportunities.

The ONE THING for today: Every day there are important things that only you can do, but there is also the most important thing that only you can do and to miss that one thing is to miss out on a priceless opportunity that you will never get back.