I am a planner by nature. I will sit down about once a month to plan out all sorts of things. I’ve struggled from time to time with needing to be in the know about what’s going on in life. So, when something is impossible to “plan,” I can get nervous or anxious, mostly because I can’t predict an outcome, at all.
What has been even more challenging for me is to be patient. Now, in certain finite things I guess I can say I’m patient because I know that there is an end in sight, eventually. For example, barring any unforeseen circumstances, my kids will graduation high school. This also means they will make it to adulthood and therefore become adults. I’ve already lived this idea once so far, so it’s not that I have to have stress or anxiety about it, nothing can stop time, after all. Kids aren’t kids forever. A car does get paid off, eventually. A leaky faucet can be fixed. A broken bone does heal. A cruddy winter does transition to spring.
A marriage is ongoing and will continue as such indefinitely. It doesn’t just pause, take a hiatus, move on to other ventures for a while until it suits. That’s tough. Still, it involves two people.
What do I do with my time with the Lord? How do I organize my time around life, responsibilities, and all these things I can manage when I don’t always have answers for this one thing? It’s been so hard to figure out, but I have decided that it’s much easier to simply do nothing. Now, that sounds wrong. What I have noted, though, is that if I try and work myself up into a powerful emotional state, I just get stressed out-like I have to reach that pinnacle every time I am “with” the Lord, or it’s not good, not worthy. Now, I do what I can, when I can. And, yes, I do MAKE time for Him daily: praying or reading, or studying, or worshipping…but not all three, for a specific time period, or else. I have to trust that the time I put in does pay dividends, and not anything substantive that I can “cash out” or show anyone. It’s just between me and Him. And, if I’m honest, the fruit of that time is evident with others in my life so that over time my closeness to Him draws others to that place, or at least considering that place, too :).
Trusting the process of faith, the process of relationship…of time, of commitment, of honor, of value, of hope, of trust, of need, of surrender is just so intimate, private, necessary. It’s often all I have and that’s all I can do.