Present Over Perfect
My husband says I have a sickness—birthday party planning sickness. As my kids have gotten older, my symptoms are starting to go into remission, but when the 
kids were younger, age 3 to 8, I had a severe case of birthday party planning disease. Pinterest and birthdaypartyideas.com contributed to my illness. I would start planning and preparing three months before each child’s birthday and create elaborate Star Wars, spy, Angry Bird, superhero and dinosaur themed parties (if you couldn’t tell, I have all boys). We’re talking a four-foot tall paper Mache volcano that erupted, six-foot-long pirate ships with masts, sails, and cannons for a squishy ball fight, and a babysitter that I paid to wear a mask and sit partially under a table, until he “came back alive” halfway through the kid’s dissection of his spaghetti stomach. The best was the spy party where I iced a 
cardboard box to look like a cake, and we sang Happy Birthday. As I cut into the cardboard and the kids saw it was a fake cake, my husband stood outside the window as “the spy who double-crossed them” holding the real cake. What I didn’t anticipate was all the kids jumping up from their seats and chasing my husband, now running full speed, with our only cake around the house. Thankfully my husband is athletic, and he kept the cake intact.I thought everything was great until one year one of my boys burst into tears in the middle of his party. My first reaction was, “You can’t cry. Don’t you know how many hours I’ve put into planning this?” Then, I checked myself. What was the purpose of
this party? Wasn’t it to celebrate my child? To be thankful for him and grateful to be blessed with another year? Yet, he was crying. He was overstimulated to the max. I’d been working so hard to throw the perfect birthday party that I’d overlooked my child’s happiness.It’s easy to get carried away in life. There are so many Jones’ to keep up with, compare ourselves to, and outdo. But, is it really worth our sacrifice of time or the sacrifice of relationships? Is it hurting or helping our family, our friends, or our neighbors? Sometimes it seems like a good thing. Birthday parties can be wonderful. But, sometimes we don’t realize what is being sacrificed by our good intentions until things are put into perspective.I love the Bible. There are so many stories filled with wisdom, so much you can learn from it, but when Jesus was asked, he broke it down to this: love God and love your neighbor. That is the perspective we need to see our world from. That is the focus of our lives. We need to put God, our families and others above ourselves. We need to be constantly checking, is what I’m doing helping God and helping others, or is it just busy work? Are we really there for others focusing on them and not ourselves? Are we being present over perfect?