Chances & Opportunities

It’s been said that time flies. It surely does.

When a couple gets married, they really don’t think about the years ahead. They usually hope to have children. When their children are born, they don’t really understand how fast that time can go. If you talk about when their children will graduate, parents will most likely comment, "That is years away." It may be, but it goes more quickly than a person realizes.

I’ve often said a child is born one day and graduates from high school the next day.

Each day melts into the next. Too often we miss out on opportunities that each day presents. The chance to set aside work in order to spend time with your child or children. To sit down together and play a board game.

The chance to stop what you are doing and really listen to what your child is telling you, whether it’s about what they are doing or what happened in school or Sunday school.

The chance to go for a walk with your child and talk about what you see. It’s a great way to help provide your child a different way to learn about nature.

The chance to demonstrate how to help others by taking them with you when you deliver a donation to the food bank. Or donate money to worthy causes. It’s a time when you can explain to your children about how fortunate and blessed they are to have what they do and why in some instances there are families that have very little. Or to visit someone they know who is ill and offer their help.

The chance to gather up what is needed for a picnic by a lake or in a park where the children can run and play to their heart’s content.

The chance to have meals together, to have the children help prepare those meals. To learn how to plan a menu, set the table, cook the food. And then to teach them the importance of clearing up afterwards. How to store the leftover food and then how to make use of that food. And the necessity for cleanliness.

Opportunities to spend time with your children, to teach them, abound every day. Take advantage of them because once the chance is gone it will never return. Don’t pass up your opportunities because one day you may find yourself wishing you could turn the clock back.