Urgent Grace

God gives us time. But who has time for God? This may not make any good sense.

A well-known pastor was once asked what his most profound regret in life was: “Being in a hurry.” That is what he said.

Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry.

But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing…. Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.^a

In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.

Haste makes waste. The hurry makes us hurt.

Whatever the pace, time will keep it and there’s no outrunning it, only speeding it up and pounding the feet harder; the minutes pound faster too. Race for more and you’ll snag on time and leak empty. Hurry always empties a soul.

In a world with cows to buy and fields to see and work to do, in the beep and blink of the twenty-first century, with its “live in the moment” buzz phrase that none of the whirl-weary seem to know how to do, who actually knows how to take time and live with soul and body and God all in sync?

Life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.

It’s only the amateurs — and this I have been, and it’s been ugly — who think slow and urgent are contradictory, opposite poles. Is this the secret that all the life experts know? That in Christ, urgent means slow. That in Christ, the most urgent necessitates a slow and steady reverence. That in Christ, time is not running out. This day is not a sieve, losing time. In Christ, we fill — gaining time.

We stand on the brink of eternity. So there is enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real. Time to laugh long, time to give God glory and to rest deep and to sing joy. And just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done. There is time to grab the jacket off the hook and time to go out to all air and sky and green. And time to read and wonder and laugh with all of them in all this light.

All this time refracting in prism.

All this time that could refract in praise …

So what if we really paid attention

and nickel-and-dimed life away

on afternoon tag by the cedars.

A string of bare toes with a stack of old books.

This one lone bowl filling with morning light.

Day after day, shelling out slow mindfulness

on whatnots of amazing grace,

collecting pieces of God-glory.

This buying a bit of medicine

that cures ADD of the soul.

Lord, I can’t fully express my gratitude for the time You’ve given. So I want to spend my life really living today.