Devotion 399 - time

When you take time out of the equation, you give eternal back to God.

 Turns out taking a clock off the wall can make a big difference in how you feel time. The old clock had hung in the same spot for ten years.

I can forget appointments.  I can forget birthdays.  I can forget lunches and back packs and healthy snacks.  I can forget where it is I put that ten-year old clock after I took it off the wall.  And I forgot, at least one hundred times that I had taken her down, because that is just about how many times I looked at that blank wall.

I had an entire two days to put my kitchen back together.  It was freshly painted.  My whole weekend was dedicating to restoring order to the disorder.  I was focused, yet I kept glancing at that wall.  It got almost unnerving how reliant I was at looking up there.  

I see people who do this with their phones and I scoff wondering who could need or want interruptions that often.  Evidently it is not information, or communication I crave, it is time. 

I discovered something.  When you cannot see time, you feel time.  Strange this, the Eternal God sets into us a keen awareness of the present and the passage of time.  Yet when that awareness is suddenly altered, it becomes more intangible, more freeing, more holy. It feels like something that is not strictly our own but belonging to a higher purpose and a more divine cause.

I stopped thinking of time in minutes but rather in purpose. When my daughter skipped through the kitchen and asked to play bubbles; I stopped.  I had no reference of my closeness to an hour or my readiness for a meal.  I stepped away from my chore, we played, and I returned, never thinking a moment was wasted or rushed as it was not measured or recorded.

 My daughter put her pajamas on late that night.  I had not looked at the clock but I could tell as the stars hung high we had long since passed her bedtime.  She held me close as we read more stories and told me, “This was the best day ever.”

These words are common for Ava.  Gratefully she has a lot of ‘best days’ but rarely can I say the same.  

This was an exception.

It had been an exhausting day.  My legs hurt, my back hurt, I felt like I had used more muscles than I knew I had, but there was something terrifically special about the day.  It was all mine and all His.  I found Him in the memories of dishes packed away and art projects hidden in drawers.  Nothing about the day felt hurried or stolen or frustrating or forced.  It felt whole.

 

What have I ever gained by hurrying?  What have I ever lost by resting? There is something sacred about seeking the presence of God, but it takes time. 

I want to seek Him.  I want to rest in Him.  I want to find Him in the gentle and the hard, not just in the beginning and the end, but in the in between.

It is He that wants to fill the middle, the moments, the mundane.

We run about looking when the appointments have already been set before us in the dazzling sunrise, the sparkling eyes, the hurting hearts. There is nothing random; there is only abundance and a forever of righteous.

 

“Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders.”

Deuteronomy 33:12