But the exact day and hour? No one knows that, not even heaven’s angels, not even the Son. Only the Father. So keep a sharp lookout, for you don’t know the timetable. It’s like a man who takes a trip, leaving home and putting his servants in charge, each assigned a task, and commanding the gatekeeper to stand watch. So, stay at your post, watching. You have no idea when the homeowner is returning, whether evening, midnight, cockcrow, or morning. You don’t want him showing up unannounced, with you asleep on the job. I say it to you, and I’m saying it to all: Stay at your post. Keep watch. Mark 13:32-34 (The Message)
I didn’t buy a calendar this year. What’s the use? No matter how hard I try, I can’t keep track of the days. They just go by so fast. There have been periods in my life when time seemed to crawl. As a child anticipating Christmas, as a young woman eager to go to college, as an expectant mom waiting for the birth of my baby, as the mother of a teenager hoping he would grow up and soon. But, lately, I feel I barely open my eyes in the morning and it is time to lie back down. I keep getting my days mixed up, thinking its Tuesday and realizing its Wednesday. How can it be time to sign time cards again? Didn’t I just do this? How can 2010 be over already when part of me remembers worrying about the projected computer crashes of the millennium? Where did my babies go? Thank God my middle schoolers are gone! It has been almost a year since youngest son went to Haiti and I was fretting about his safety. Even less since we were rushing around getting his papers turned in for Paramedic School. Wasn’t it just last week that oldest son came home for three months that stretched so far ahead of us? Or adopted daughter made her plane reservations to come celebrate Christmas? I put up the Christmas decorations, blinked and it was time to take them down again! Didn’t I worry about not having anything to enter into the fair which opened today? Then, I had to narrow down my choices because I could only enter ten things. Where does the time go? I anticipate events, sometimes dread them, and sometimes eagerly await them. Some things I want to live over and over again and hold onto. Others I am glad to see them finished and done with. Regardless of good or bad, they slide right by like waves rushing to the shore. Sometimes, I cannot account for that time. It’s like I’m sleepwalking and I don’t know how I used the time, it is just gone. Was I sweeping the floor? Reading a book? Surfing the net? I don’t know. This is a week of milestones. My oldest boy will be a quarter century old and leave for Park Ranger School. Youngest son will start his clinicals at the hospital and work on real patients who are sick or dying. My in-laws will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. My mom will turn 78. In the middle of it all, I am trying to pack for Guatemala, finish a grant application, hire a new staff person, kick off a fundraising campaign, prepare to teach a Bible Study, fuse some glass, clean the refrigerator and conquer the piles of laundry. The hardest thing about my hectic schedule is remembering to keep my focus on what is important. Time with God, family, friends. Those memories are what will last. Even if I can’t remember what day this is.
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