Disclaimer: This post has nothing to do with the rapture or end time’s theology. 🙂

Two days ago my sweet wife sent me this text.

“We are only 62 days from due date. Aaack!”

What she meant by that is “We’ve only got 62 days to get a bunch of things done!!!!”

I quickly responded with this text:

“62 days until we get to meet her. Woo hoo!”

The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking about this silly little text exchange ever since. We do have a to do list a mile long and I’m not quite sure we’ll get everything done before the baby makes it here. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve been busy and we’ve gotten a lot done. We cleaned out the garage (that may not make sense since… she won’t be living in the garage, I promise), we had an epic garage sale, I painted the rest of the house (all the common areas), we’ve bought diapers (that’s another story people) and kinds of other stuff.

However, it’s very easy to get so focused on all the stuff, the to do lists and busy ourselves with all the preparations that we totally forget that everything is getting ready to change for us. I really don’t think it has set in yet. I mean, we’ve done this before with Titus and the change was significant… but it’s been so long since we’ve had sleepless nights, diapers, bottles. Although we’ve had one child already, we’ve never had two. I really have no idea how much harder this is going to me. Honestly, I’ve spent very little time thinking about this… I’ve been too busy getting everything ready and doing all the normal stuff in life.

I can’t say that I’ve really spent that much time thinking about how to father a daughter. I can’t tell you how excited I am, but I’ve really not spent nearly as much time thinking, planning and praying about raising a daughter. Again, I’ve been too busy getting everything ready and doing all the normal stuff in life.

I don’t want to minimized the list of things to be done because they are important. However, I’m pretty sure that preparing my heart to parent a daughter and preparing for the significant change of enlarging our family by one more is far more important than the list. Isn’t it funny how we get distracted from the most important by the urgent.

I think this is a little more personal because I talked about this last weekend at a conference in NC. In kidmin we often push ourselves toward being successful in the short term. How many kids came to faith this year? How many kids did we have this Sunday compared to the same Sunday last year? How many volunteers do I have now compared to 6 months ago? These are great things to focus on, but I wonder if asking the question “How many of the kids who came through my ministry 8-10 years ago who are now in college are still chasing after Jesus?” Isn’t that question more important? Why don’t we spend more time preparing for that?

The same is true for us personally. How often do we sit and dream about the day we finally stand before God and give an account for what we’ve done. Isn’t that far more important to all the other urgent (and important) distractions in life?

That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.