To Mark the Days and Seasons

By Phillip Garside

As the school year amps up, having multiple children in multiple schools means that multi-tier schedules are reasserting their dominance over our digital calendars.

Society is geared to the individual, not the community. Unchecked, society’s incursion onto our family digital calendar will tear the family in 16 different directions. Our calendars can become overbearing taskmasters when one child is at a sport, another’s aftercare has a shelf life, a third gets an unexpected invite, and one parent has a semi-regular late meeting.

In this situation, it is helpful to remember Jesus’ assertion, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The calendar exists for us, not us for the calendar.

The discerning parent must manage an entire interwoven set of human developments and enrichment. The calendar should not simply be a temporal marker of “the world’s” demands. Rather, it should be approached as a tool to facilitate how the family glorifies God in their daily lives.

When sculpting the family’s time, parents must consider the edification of each family member, the marriage, the family as a whole and every individual pattern of interrelationship. At each entry, it helps to take stock of how this “event” helps our true goal, the glorification of God.

By regarding the calendar this way, it ceases to be a taskmaster of the world and becomes both a tool and a record of the familial experience of priestly offering and sacrifice in our day to day lives.