The Sunday Sacrifice

Dan and I have made it a priority to attend church every Sunday. We don't often skip church, except for illness or an occasional family recovery day. When we started having kids five years ago, going to church became harder. As almost any parent of a young child knows, church quite often coincides with morning nap time. This means that we have to either rearrange our day to accommodate a different nap time (haha...like that's possible!) or our child doesn't nap. The ripple affect of this is an overtired and cranky child on Sunday and in our case, often a cranky child for 3-4 days afterwords.  This means that we have finally fully recovered by Thursday. We then have three days of pleasant interactions (baring any sickness, teething or any other factors), until we start the process all over again.

Now that most of our kids are older and have dropped the morning nap, we have a different problem. Our children wake up early (as in 6am is sleeping in)! On Sundays, we choose to have a bigger breakfast and shower the kids. This means that by the time Dan and I have dragged our butts out of bed, fed and dressed the kids, its often too late to do anything, like a quick walk, before Sunday School starts at 9:30am. This messes up our whole day.  Normally we eat lunch at 10:30, which coincidentally is the same time the church service starts. An hour later and church is over, and we are already half an hour later for our normal nap/quiet time and we still haven't eaten lunch! So our day is messed up and our kids are quite often antsy, overtired and hungry. Then, we go home, shove lunch down our throats and head straight to bed for a nap. By the time everyone is awake, its 3pm.  That gives us an hour or so before we need to start dinner before moving onto bedtime routines. The entire day is gone (except for that one precious hour between 3-4pm). No wait! We still need a snack before dinner, since lunch may or may not have been eaten and we cannot handle hungry children! Therefore, the day is gone. Breakfast, church, naps, snack, dinner, bed.  

Dan and I call this phenomenon the Sunday sacrifice. Our entire day has been sacrificed for two hours of church. This means that one of Dan's two days off is spent in church or awaiting the end of nap time. 

There are definitely days that we would rather stay home or go out on an adventure somewhere. But instead, we keep heading to church. Those two hours are worth it.  The Sunday Sacrifice is hard.

We realized early on in our parenting career, we needed to go to church every week, even if it was hard. Because for us, its too tempting to skip every week for another hour in bed, or a walk in the woods. (ohhh how we miss Bedside Baptist, with Reverend Pillow talking about the Great Comforter). Attending church became a top priority for us.

We have friends that are quite involved in church and ministry. They have designated one week a month as family time. Dan and I love this idea. Since hearing it, we have desperately tried to institute it. But there is always something dragging us to church instead. (...but Angelika is preaching, the kids are singing this morning, Dan teaching Sunday School, its raining, we could really use a nap later...)

So needless to say, we go to church.  Our Sunday sacrifice continues whether we want it to or not.

But I guess as I reflect about it, we know that sacrificing our Sundays is worth it. We've talked often about how much we love our church. We love the multi-generational community we have. We love the messages we may or may not hear. And even on those days that we spend the entire service in the Mother's room or half asleep in the pew, we know that we are instilling an important habit in our boys lives. Its important to us that our boys see the importance of church. Its important that church attendance becomes a healthy habit.  Its important for us to continue to build those relationships with others that we may not have outside of church. We have made friends with people who are our parents and grandparents age. They are our cheerleaders, people who challenge us and people who understand and have gone before us, ready to encourage us during our run through the gauntlet. Our children have built relationships with people who have different skills and interests than us. They nurture our children. Encourage our children. Pray for our children. Teach our children.  We know that sacrificing our Sundays is worth it in the long run.

So whether we take a week off from church attendance or not, we know that both are good. We know we need a balance of attendance. A balance of sacrifice and relationship building. So we soldier on, waking up each Sunday making a choice. A choice to go to church and/or grow together as a family. Both are sacrifices. Both are worth it.