I'm often asked what I perceive to be the greatest threat to families today. I could talk, in response, about alcoholism, drug abuse, infidelity, and the other common causes of divorce. But there is another curse that accounts for more family breakups than the others combined. It is the simple matter of overcommitment and the tyranny of the urgent.
Husbands and wives who fill their lives with never-ending volumes of work are too exhausted to take walks together, to share their deeper feelings, to understand and meet each other's needs. They're even too worn out to have a meaningful sexual relationship, because fatigue is a destroyer of desire.
This breathless pace predominates in millions of households, leaving every member of the family frazzled and irritable. Husbands are moonlighting to bring home more money. Wives are on their own busy career track. Children are often ignored, and life goes speeding by in a deadly routine. Even some grandparents are too busy to keep the grandkids. I see this kind ofovercommitment as the quickest route to the destruction of the family. And there simply must be a better way.
Some friends of mine recently sold their house and moved into a smaller and less expensive place just so they could lower their payments and reduce the hours required in the workplace. That kind of downward mobility is almost unheard of today--it's almost un-American. But when we reach the end of our lives and we look back on the things that mattered most, those precious relationships with people we love will rank at the top of the list.
If friends and family will be a treasure to us then, why not live like we believe it today? That may be the best advice I have ever given anyone--and the most difficult to implement.
HOME WITH A HEARTBy Dr. James Dobson