On Commitment

It seems that every day our society is getting more and more selfish and worrying less and less about commitments made to friends, family, coworkers, teams, clubs, and other entities to which we may make commitments. I'm not sure people even really know what commitment means anymore. And it's happening on every level, to every degree, in every age group.

Yesterday one of my 8th graders came to me and said she was too scared to play her part in the play and she wasn't going to do it. The play is 1 week away. It is completely voluntary; kids who don't want to perform don't have to audition. She wanted desperately to play this role, she won it through our audition process and now, with 1 week to go, she says she's scared and won't do it. Thankfully I had another student who was willing to step up and take on the role with such short notice, but wow...really? You just won't. There was no remorse, and she said she's always been scared to perform and she gets nervous. So...you knew this 3 weeks ago and you asked to be in the play anyway??

Then, not 8 hours later, one of our players informed us that she would be leaving early from a game day to head to a friend's wedding. We've known about this for a while; she's in the wedding and, at that point, had to leave our double header after the first game to get to the wedding. We said fine - what else were we going to do? Now she's concerned that she won't make it in time and will have to drive like a maniac, so she came to us and asked if we could move the game time up to give her more time to make it to the wedding. Um, no. We cannot ask another coach to change a game time so our player can get to her friend's wedding. There are too many hoops to jump through, too many people who would need to give their approval - and instead of approving it, they'd simply laugh at us and say "nice try." When we said we could not change game time she told us she would be leaving at X time, regardless of where we were at in the game.

You know, my best friend got married during softball season. I told her from the beginning that I couldn't guarantee I'd be there and to pray for rain. Luckily it did rain and I got to attend, but I never would have committed to anything more than a maybe because I'd already made a commitment to my team. I never would have dreamed of asking my coach if I could miss a game or two to attend a wedding, even if it was a family member! Family and friends know me, and they know not to try to make plans during season.

Add onto that all the stories I've been hearing lately about people falling "out of love" with their spouse and deciding it's time to move on, and I'm just sick of people. Every marriage is going to go through rough patches, but the stories I'm hearing are of people decided after just a couple of weeks that the romance is gone and they're going to move on. Huh? Two weeks? A month? Really? That's enough time for you to throw away the commitment you made and start over?

I'm coming to see that a commitment means very little to people these days. Generally, commitments come with all kinds of loopholes and exceptions, rendering them useless. We have become a horribly selfish society, and I'm not liking it at all.