Friday Mom has waded in deep over at her place, and her wonderful thoughts about mid-life have really got me thinking further about what I want my life to be. Then I stopped by jo(e)’s place this morning and was totally captivated by this post. What a rich life this person seems to lead, dense with joy, heartbreak, and adventure.

I wrote somewhere recently that the twenties were about figuring out who I was, and the thirties are about figuring out who I’m not—I can’t remember whether it was PastorG or I who said that first, but we probably got it from somewhere else, anyway. That is, what are those things that I have to accept just probably won’t happen in this “wild and precious life”? Saying yes to something means saying no to something else, and as Bonhoeffer says, we’re usually not deciding between Good and Bad, but between two Goods.

I traveled to Mexico for several weeks during seminary, and thanks to several years of Spanish language classes in high school and college, by the time I left I could just about get by. Our translator recommended a language immersion program in Guatemala that was affordable and effective. “A couple weeks there and you’d be totally fluent,” she said. I got pregnant a few months later, and international travel became a lot more complicated. It’s always been a dream of mine to really be able to speak another language though. I hope it will be a dream deferred rather than dropped—and there are other ways to get there, of course, besides a week or two in Guatemala.

In our tradition, we have a prayer of confession that says,

O God, we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone…

So much is left undone in life and in ministry. Does anything ever really get done? Even sermons, which have a deadline, are never really finished, just abandoned.

A woman walked into my office yesterday, and as soon as I saw Martha’s gentle, smiling face peeking through the doorway, I knew what she was going to say, and I cringed inside. She was going to ask about Glenda, an elderly woman in our congregation who has moved to a nursing home far from the church and who needs help getting to church on Sundays. I cringed because she has talked to me several times before about Glenda, asking whether anyone in the church would be able to help her get Glenda to and from worship each month. It’s too much for one person. And it is. I just haven’t done anything about it, beyond an initial appeal to the congregation. Neither has Rev. B, and neither of us has visited Glenda recently either. Yet we have visited others. We have been doing ministry. But Glenda represents something very precious left undone. And there are a million Glendas.

Watching my aunt come to the end of her life has me thinking about time. Time is seen as our master; we are slaves to it; so often it’s seen as a burden. Last week I found myself saying, in the midst of impending fall programs and a burgeoning to-do list, “I am really falling behind.” From out of nowhere a voice came, “What if you stopped looking at it that way? What if you just decided not to think about time that way?” Unfortunately, the voice was irritatingly silent when I asked it how I was supposed to think about time instead. Stupid non-specific voice.

I suppose I know the answer in the abstract—it is possible to see time as a gift—even the scarcity of our time can be a gift, because it invites us to clear away the chaff, the things that drain us and don’t nurture the world. Many of you know chronos and kairos, two Greek words for time. Chronos is clock time, the time we feel enslaved by. Kairos is God’s time, which I understand to be a sense that whatever is happening at the moment is good, sufficient, and Spirit-filled. Kairos is a Holy Now. I wrote last year, “Kairos feels shorter than you expect, because you are lost in the moment and the minutes fly by. It feels longer than you expect, because the time is saturated with more than seems possible.”

When the fullness of time came, God sent the Son to redeem the world. (Galatians 4:4, paraphrased by me) Why first century Palestine? Why then and there? Who knows. It was the fullness of time. I hardly think that God was wringing her hands over the Almighty to-do list in the time before the Son came—“Oh, I’m up to my elbows with this Babylonian exile, when am I going to find time to get Jesus down there?” It happened in the fullness of time.

Inhale…

Exhale.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to hurry to the midwife’s office for a quick appointment, then dash to the church to do 7 hours’ worth of work in 4 hours.

But I will try to do it mindfully.