Time

I find time to be a paradoxical thing. It seems the less you have of it, the more you complain about wanting more. However, the more time you have, at least for me personally, the more of it you waste. I’m not talking about time that is measured by months or years. I mean time in the more transient sense - seconds, minutes, hours. This is the time that we squander.

This new “career change” has really opened up my schedule. Sometimes I have entire days with nothing on the agenda. Because of this, I find my days filled with unimportant things. It’s funny - before this schedule became my reality I was excited about all the possibilities that more time would allow me to do...things like creating art and playing music, picking up some extra hobbies, going to the gym, reading, etc. These things, however, remain on the list of things I have yet to do with all my time. Instead I find myself wasting away on the couch, consumed by facebook or the latest TV series on Netflix instant stream.

So why am I admitting these things to you? Because what it comes down to is this - at the end of the day we are all alloted the same amount of time. No more, no less. It’s what we do with the 24 hours we are given that tells us what kind of a person we are. At this point in my life, I am not the kind of person I want to be. I had all these dreams and hopes of what my life would look like after college. And don’t get me wrong, some pretty great things have happened over the past two years since graduation. But I feel like I am just sitting back watching my life go by, watching time slip away. Deep down, I know that is not the kind of person I am. 

I have spent my whole life waiting. In high school I was always waiting for college. Once I reached the milestone of graduation and finally made it to college, I found myself waiting there too. I was waiting for Christmas break, then for the next semester, then for summer break. Towards the end of summer I was always waiting and anticipating the trip back up to school. I am not alone in this. I continually hear people say that they are just ready to get out of wherever they are. Someone will passively say that they cannot wait to be out of school, or be finished with their internship, or in the real world, or back in school. We all want to move to Africa or Mumbai or Europe. Somewhere in ourselves we want to believe that if we can get out of the current context then we will finally be set free. And then we wait.

Waiting can be the death of us. It puts us in a coma of time, in which we are lethargic and unresponsive. This concept may seem harsh, but I think we even use the will of God as an excuse to not live out our lives. We say we are praying for God’s will, or that we are waiting for Him to open a door or somehow reveal to us our next steps. And then the waiting comes. But what if, instead of focusing on this ambiguous “will of God,” we focus on the fact that we were sent? This doesn’t always look like we want it to look and I think that’s where we get confused. When I think of being sent, I think of the times in my life when I was on an airplane headed to Mexico, Australia, El Salvador, South Africa, or some other physical mission field or exciting destination. But the thing is, not only are we sent to those far off places, or those mountain top experiences of faith - we are sent home too.

I am still learning what it means to be sent and where that will take me next in life. There is no formula, no clear cut answer or bullet point list. Being sent just means that we have to go and it means that we are not ready. It means that we are broken and hurting and yet, at the same time, we’re very much alive and whole. It means that you probably have this aching inside of your chest sometimes. You know the times where you feel like there is something that is just beating inside of you and you can’t figure out how to get it out? The feeling where you have a wall between you and whatever it is that you are supposed to be? To be sent anywhere, whether it is to Haiti or Cape Town or Madison, IN could simply mean that you are to remind everyone around you that this kingdom inside of us is real and it is coming.

I just started reading Francis Chan’s Forgotten God, a book about “reversing our tragic neglect of the Holy Spirit.” Something he said in the introduction really hit me and I think it speaks to this idea of time and waiting and being sent. “I refuse to live the remainder of my life where I am right now, stagnating at this point. Don’t get me wrong: God has already done so much in my life, and I am grateful for it. I’m just convinced there’s more. There’s more of the Spirit and more of God than any of us is experiencing. I want to go there--not just intellectually, but in life, with everything that I am.” 

My next task is to find out what it means to live sent here in Madison.