Honestly, Sandie

Creative inspiration for this piece came from “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing” by Jack Johnson. As always, this post is not about the song itself. It’s about the thoughts, memories, and questions it stirred up while I was writing.

Last year my grandson played lacrosse.

I still couldn’t tell you much about the rules. What I can tell you is that there were a lot of little boys wearing oversized helmets, running full speed in random directions, occasionally making contact with the ball, and somehow having the time of their lives.

It was fun to watch.

It was also one of those moments that sneaks up on you.

The kind where you’re sitting in a folding chair on the sidelines thinking you’re watching one thing, but your brain quietly wanders off and starts connecting dots from twenty years ago.

My grandson is almost seven now. He is funny, curious, energetic, and at that age where the whole world is still wide open. Every activity feels possible. Every interest is waiting to be discovered.

As I watched him play, I found myself thinking about how kids end up becoming who they become.

Most children don’t discover things on their own. Someone puts a baseball glove in their hand.Someone signs them up for soccer. Someone buys the dance shoes. Someone spends Tuesday evenings driving them across town. Someone decides there is enough room in the schedule to give it a try.

Childhood is often shaped by whatever the adults around you make room for.

A while back, I told my daughter that Alex and I would help however we could. Being a single mom is hard. There are only so many hours in a day and only so much energy to go around. I want my grandson to have opportunities to try things, learn things, and discover what he enjoys. I want him to know there is a big world out there waiting for him.

And somewhere in the middle of that thought, another one showed up.

Maybe that’s why they signed him up in the first place. Maybe she understands how important those opportunities are because she remembers what it felt like when there wasn’t always room for them.

That thought stopped me. Because our family wasn’t always that way. When our oldest kids were little, we did sports.

Alex coached. I was the team mom.

We packed snacks, coordinated schedules, sat through practices, and spent weekends cheering from the sidelines and the pit. There were soccer games, softball games, team pictures, and all the normal chaos that comes with raising kids.

Then church got bigger.

Not my faith. Not my belief in God. Not my desire to help people. Church itself got bigger. The calendar got fuller. The requests increased. The responsibilities multiplied. Somewhere along the way, our lives slowly began revolving around whatever was happening next. Wednesday nights. Weekend services. Volunteer meetings. Planning sessions. Special services. Leadership gatherings. If there was an opening, we filled it. If there was a need, we stepped in. Looking back, we were basically the human version of duct tape. If something was falling apart, someone called us.

None of it felt wrong at the time. We loved the people. We believed in what we were building. Most of the friendships were real. Most of the work mattered. That’s what makes this complicated. It would be easier if I could point to one giant red flag and say, “There. That’s the problem.” Instead, it looked like a thousand small decisions that all seemed reasonable in the moment. One event. One commitment. One more thing on the calendar. One more place to be.

What I didn’t understand was that every yes is pulling from the same account.

There aren’t separate energy reserves for parenting, marriage, work, friendships, church, and everything else. There’s just you. One body. One schedule. One family. One limited amount of time before you collapse on the couch and stare into space while pretending you’re watching Netflix. Every commitment comes from somewhere. Every obligation takes a bite out of something else. The problem is that you don’t always notice what’s disappearing until years later.

My younger kids inherited a different version of us than our older kids did. That realization has been hard to sit with. Not because they were less loved. Not because they mattered less. There was simply less room left. Less margin. Less availability. Less ability to look at a flyer for soccer, basketball, baseball, dance, or whatever random activity a kid wants to try and say, “Sure, let’s see if you like it.”

My son loves basketball now. Every time I watch him play, I wonder what would have happened if he had been part of a team when he was younger. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. My youngest daughter probably would have tried a dozen different activities if we’d had the space. Maybe she would have hated every single one of them. That’s not really the point. The point is they never had much opportunity to find out. We decided along the way that we didn’t want to try and make anything else fit into our weekly church schedules. In the last years of Alex coaching, he did so because being the coach meant he could pick the practice days. And picking meant we wouldn’t have to fight with our already full schedules. He coached because he loved the chance to help kids win. We stuck with the full church schedule because we really loved helping others win and we thought that what we were doing was actually helping that happen.

The funny part is that from the outside we looked like the family that had it all together. Church people loved us. They praised our commitment. They complimented our family. They talked about our sacrifice like it was some kind of gold medal event. Nobody saw the math happening behind the scenes. Nobody saw the opportunities we passed on, the activities we skipped, or the pieces of normal family life that quietly got traded away to make room for everything else.

The older I get, the more I realize two things can be true at the same time. The people mattered. The work mattered. The relationships mattered. The impact mattered. Those things are all true. What’s also true is that my kids mattered. My marriage mattered. The ordinary little moments that happen at home mattered too. One truth doesn’t cancel out the other.

Watching my grandson run around that lacrosse field didn’t make me wish I could go back and erase everything. It simply made me wonder how many opportunities my own kids never got because I was busy creating opportunities for everyone else’s. That thought has followed me home more than once. Turns out a bunch of six-year-olds running around with sticks can accidentally hand you a life lesson when you least expect it.

Tomorrow on Threshold Thursday, we’ll step across the line from what it cost to the harder question: Why did so many good people believe that giving more and more of themselves was the right thing to do?