Begin With the End in Mind

At our monthly Mom's gathering this month, we were discussing the use of our time; one of God's greatest gifts and one of the few resources that is not renewable or able to be replenished. The discussion was not for the sake of heaping more guilt on ourselves, since most of us do that quite well, but for the purpose of evaluating how we are using our time and whether we are being as effective as we can be. Notice the word "effective", it has a very different meaning than the word "busy". I looked them both up in the dictionary this evening and their meanings are almost opposite:
Effective - "producing a decisive or desired effect"
Busy - "to be full of activity"
(both definitions take from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2004)
I don't know about you, but I want my life to be effective while trying to stay away from being busy. How do we accomplish that? I think it goes back to a phrase that is used quite often, that I referred to in my title, "Begin With the End in Mind".
We should be examining what our goals are for ourselves, our families and our children. Then we can measure the parts of our daily activity against something that is predetermined as a set standard. If we are parenting "With the End in Mind" we should be thinking ahead to what we want our children to truly value when they are grown adults. We should be looking at how we want them to be able to stand up for God and His Truth. We should be dreaming of what God may have for them to do with the gifts He has placed within each of them. Those should be the things that determine where and how we invest our time and subsequently, their time, right now.
For our Mom's Night, we looked a Jar of Time:
Given the fact that we each have 24 hours a day to work with, we talked about the age old illustration of Big Rocks. The only way we can get the Big Rocks into our lives is to put them there first!
Our children will have many things they are drawn to and interested in but as parents it is not up to us to accommodate every fad or whim - it is up to us to prayerfully discern with them AND for them, what is the most EFFECTIVE use of their time and ours.
God has given us the ability as parents to have experienced how fast the early years fly by and I believe it is up to us to choose wisely for our children. May we not look back with regret to wasted years of BUSY when we could have been EFFECTIVE!