Middle Daughter and my grandsons are visiting from Switzerland, and we’re juggling schedules to create as much family time as possible in the limited days we have together. I am acutely aware of how precious our hours are. Though I want to hold on, time slips through my fingers without a backward glance. A song from my youth, drawn from the wisdom of Solomon plays in my head.
To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter or purpose under heaven Eccl 3:1 AMP
I’ve lived most of my life looking toward the future, somehow assuming there would always be more time, another chance for a do-over, opportunity for change, for what-I’ve-always-wished-for to arrive.
Perhaps it is the deaths of loved ones in the last year or two, or maybe it’s just the wisdom of aging, but I have a growing sense of the limitations of my life, and of those I care about.
And that we can only live in this one — this moment — this blink-of-an-eye moment.
No where else.
To learn to live in now, I am discovering the wisdom of knowing what time, what season I’m in.
And living fully into it, even when it is not what I expected or anticipated.
There is a time to build, and look toward the future.
And there is also a time to relax.
After a rigorous day on the ski slopes, my oldest Swiss grandson flopped into a chair and announced to his mom, “I’m chillaxing.”
His first day on the beach here, he carried that forward.
Relaxing and chilling out — chillaxing — resonates as a skill for me to acquire.
You’d think that after months of my semi-invalid life that I’d have that one down pat. But give me a day of normal energy and I’m zooming around like that little pink toy bunny with the drums.
But I am learning to chillax.
And I’m learning other ways of approaching life in order to live fully in the moment.
As an introvert, I’ve always enjoyed time alone.
But now I’m enjoying time together with others with whom I share love, or faith or interests.
We rarely know when the sun will set for the last time for us, or those we love, when we, or they, will dance on into eternity.
Let us make the most of the time.
What is your biggest challenge with time?
Is it easier for you to live in the Now, or do you find yourself backwards looking or future seeking?
Are you in a season you never expected?
Glimpse of Peace 
Chillaxing!??!?! That’s the best, Jane.
As for the Season, yes, I’m in one I hadn’t anticipated.
I tend to be backward looking rather than future seeking. I wish it were the opposite, but I have this need to make sure I didn’t miss something that I was supposed to learn, so I comb over emotional wreckage quite often. Not the best, I know, but it’s how I roll…until I learn (and am ready) to roll differently.
I suppose That Season will come eventually, as well.
With heart,
Dani
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Very beautiful and timely, Jane. Chillax – Jeremy coined a great term.
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My biggest challenge with time…insert that gasping laff my bff gives in these sorts of situations when it’s nearly too absurd to do anything else…
So much of it passed before I found the traces and took the reins in appropriate ways, so little of it left now that I have found me, found my stride…
and yet, a great promise is missed by our fulminating apocalyptic dyspeptic brothers and sisters: “…for a day is as a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is as a day…”. Our God, our Awesome God Who reigns in heaven and earth in power, glory and might is God over time, and I long ago learned that it is nothing to Mama to enter time at any point in history past in answer to prayers prayed in history present, and that She works down stream on behalf of the intercessions that Jesus makes for His brothers and sisters unto the Father…downstream being the future…so that when we get there, we get to an unknown that They have already been working in and preparing a place for us…
Lastly, it is such a difficult thing for me, how others fritter time away as if it is sand and plentiful and endless, but they fritter away my time and do not yet even know there is such a thing as time past and gone…sigh. As I did in my own season.
Oh LORD…teach us to number our days in wisdom.
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Oh, dear charissagrace. Yes! Yes! Yes!
I have seen the Lord, when through guided prayer He has taken me back to show me a new story, the good story, the real story, that He wrote for my life.
(I don’t think He or She serves the wholeness of who God is, who made us in his image, male AND female. I use He because I’ve made my peace with the Father-side of God, having made my peace with my earthly father.)
It is a challenge, learning to value our time and still live in a world with many who rush on by, or step on our moment.
We have received the grace to see (though through a glass darkly), and I pray for the heart to share grace with those who still travel blind.
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Amen Jane!
Oh and Btw… Mama is my poetic intimate Name for Holy Spirit only. I totally understand and receive Abba Father as He, since scripture seems to indicate that God, the source of all gender and thus superseding gender has chosen to reveal Themselves as Father and Son.
It’s long been my contention that Holy Spirit is revealed again and again as She, but more indirectly usually (like we are anyway, usually) . Jus for keys to my writings… If I talk She, I am referring to Holy Spirit.
Oh, and I do not believe in Father and Mama in a Latter Day Saint sense of things. Again jus fyi.
You might reacquaint yourself with Proverbs 7, around 21 or so… And the Name El-Shaddai (many breasted God…) These passages are decidedly female revelations.
Having said all that? It’s Jesus! Name above all Names, King of Kings and Lord of lords! Oh Precious Jesus, my Savior and Lord, God in the flesh born from a virgin and Shepherd of my soul.
I love Him so, with all I have today to love Him with, and may Mama uncover more of me tomorrow that I can love Him with!
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I understood…it was the image of the Holy Spirit in The Shack. God is so much more than anything we can understand or define. The closer I come, the less I think I know, dogmaticly.
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Would you believe I have not ever read The Shack? S’true… Never read it.
But yes, I have heard it’s remarkablely similar
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Ohhh PS… I wrote about dementia yesterday… Never Ending Irish Rain… You might relate?
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