kinda like a birthday- what really changes as that one second clicks into a new day? you? your friends? your job? the world around you? no, nothing really changes at all, except for the letters and numbers on the post mark stamp at the post office. and yet we put a lot of meaning into those "New Year" clicks of the second hand. and i'm not just talking about a big flashy ball dropping in new york or fire works going off over Navy Pier.
a handful of clicks determined whether a tombstone for a young Denver athlete will read "1982-2006" or "1982-2007". a couple clicks determined when illinois landlords began committing class B criminal misdemeanors because of the absence of carbon monoxide detectors in their rental units. that ticking second hand determined whether your newborn child can be claimed as a dependant just as soon as you get your W-2's, or if you're going to have to wait to claim those expenses until a year from now...
i can remember as an elementary student placing great weight on the last time i wrote the date with the "old year" and the first time i wrote the date with the new. i remember thinking about how incredible it was, that this one little instant, just like so many others, carried with it more meaning than all the others. now it's 1985--- poof! now it's not! what's so magic about one little jerk of the second hand anyway? what makes that particular little jerk so much more important than all the others?
perhaps i need to think about the situation conversely: what makes all the other stacatto jumps of the second hand so much LESS important? why do i not place equal importance on every moment i exist?
on the surface, it would appear that we do credit each moment as important: ours is a society ruled by calendars, schedules, watches, alarms, deadlines, start dates, delineated holidays, vacations scheduled in advance, activities worked together like jigsaw puzzles to get the most efficient use of our time out of the 24-hours we're given, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for God only knows how many years.
or is that really the reason? are we really scheduling and living according to the calendar in order to get the most out of our available time? or are we constructing our lives into containers of 60-unit intervals because it's actually easier to do it that way instead of living our lives according to what is truly important?
the problem, of course, is that we live in a culture that would not function without chronological order, because the function of our culture is capitalism. and when the function of your society is to collect, produce, sell, buy, and enjoy the profit of consumer goods, non-scheduled life is not possible. i'm not bashing capitalism for the sake of bashing capitalism. but even if i wanted to try to organize my life (or my family's life, if i had children, etc.) around only what was truly important (and healthy) to me, i couldn't. there's too many other constraints present in my environment.
but i digress, again. even though my life is ruled by time, i tend not to truly place equal importance on every moment of time. i fall into the trap of valuing one block of time over another, and it affects my very mindset, my very understanding of my world. for instance, most of my life i have lived looking forward to "the next holiday". it starts in schools- looking forward to Christmas break, looking forward to Spring Break, looking forward to summer. then you go into the working world, and you keep looking forward to the next day off. thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's- then, oh fiddlesticks... nothing for MONTHS! unless you work for a government or financial or educational institution. then you might get martin luther king jr. day off. or president's day. or, here in chicago, roman pulaski day, off.
what's wrong with looking forward to the next day off? on the surface, nothing. but what happens when you come back to work, or to school, whatever, after one holiday, vacation, etc., and immediately focus on how long it is until the next? the interim time is immediately downgraded- no, DEgraded- to time that must be served, rather than time that gets to be enjoyed.
yeah, most people have work that they like to complain about and usually can say that they'd rather not be there. i've been in many job situations that my attitude was just so. even jobs that we initially or at the heart of it ENJOY, we can usually find stressful and wanting an escape from them. or our school/classes. or our job of caring for our children and families in the most important place, the home.
but maybe if we truly, radically stopped thinking about the moment we're in in terms of the moments to come, we'd relieve ourselves of a great deal of stress, pressure, anxiety. if we could somehow just BE exactly when we are, enjoying just BEING, we'd find our quality of being improve, at least mentally.
Jesus said it best, really. Scripture records many times this basic idea: why do we as mortal human beings worry ourselves with anything other than the right now? the Bible exhorts us to remember that God is truly in control, and will care for us even greater than He cares for the grass that withers after one day. we are directed by Jesus to seek only one thing: the kingdom of God.
my moments generally don't reflect a seeking of the kingdom of God. i'm not talking about going to africa a missionary here. i'm talking about living each moment in a way that praises and worships the One who gave me each moment. going to a bible study instead of watching my favorite TVshow. calling a friend, investing in this person who is a child of God, rather than playing a computer game. i should be cleaning and organizing my bedroom because it saps my energy and bears me down like an cartoon anvil rather than watching the movie i watched, taking the nap i took, playing the game with my roommates... reading the word of God at least as often as i read the latest issue of the 2 magazines i get. studying for the biology test i have to take January 27 rather than doing word searches, crosswords, or looking up municipal building codes.
if i could truly see time as ways to seek God and show God to others, rather than as little ticks that i am allotted to use as i see fit; rather than long stretches of time that must be endured in order to get to a somehow more important, better time; rather than viewing it as how much will i have to give up to do what must be done so that i can use all the rest for fun things.
if i could only look around every few clicks of that clock and think- wow, how was God present here just now? i'm quite confident that in doing this i would not only be better emotionally and physically, i'm certain that in seeking God in every moment He would give me the moments of rest that i have so desperately craved in the past. i read in His Word that He will provide everything i need, and this would include the moments of solitude, of peace, of rest, of relaxation that i tend to "look forward" to over all my other moments, and yet never truly seem to fully realize.
i'm rambling, i guess, now. but i went to a women's retreat in October that addressed the concept of time and how our culture's concept of time is really very detrimental and oppositional to how God wants us to live our lives. and with the New Year thing, it's been rambling about in my brain.
thanks for reading. (all 3 of you!) i guess i should sign off now and go see how i can seek God's kingdom in the next moments. prolly not by playing a game of computer boggle. or working on that crossword i started earlier... i should prolly get up, take a shower (haven't done that yet today) and spend some time seeking God's harmony in my life by putting my stacks of clean laundry away. and then i should pack up the 2 pre-paid USPS boxes i've had for two weeks to send to friends in PA and CO. They'd appreciate getting those, and i'd certainly be showing my love for God more by doing that than by doing another word search.
even if it is a book of Bible Word Searches. *grin*
i may schedule my life away, and have only a dozen moments of seeking the Kingdom of God. it's even harder being unemployed- i have all this time, and it's somehow even harder to use it.
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