Interruptions

Do you ever have one of those weekends that is almost nothing like you plan it to be?  You hope for a weekend of both rest and accomplishment, of letting the body rest even as the mind is brought to life by activities.  Instead, what you find is a weekend in which you are busy running from place to place and task to task - none of them precisely what you were hoping for, of course - until you reach the end of Sunday and realize that another weekend has fled by and you have gotten so little accomplished.

It is terribly frustrating of course, because that was your time to do such things.  The week will rapidly be consumed by the dreadnought known as "Work" with a few hours plugged in here and there to make things seem palatable.  And the week, it always seems, precludes any forward progress on anything that you would like to be doing.  The weekend will come again, of course - but it always seems to have another set of tasks that need to be accomplished, leaving one a bit farther behind than the previous week.

And this, we grumble, is life.

But perhaps it really is life - just not life as we picture it.

Our lives are too often built on the theory that they belong completely and totally to us.  They are our possession: unearned by us, uncreated by us, they may appear to be gifts which are are to be spent however we will.  To not spend them on ourselves - to have them consumed by the parts of life we consider as useless or wasteful - seems like the greatest waste of time.

But what if our lives are not about us?  What if they are about the One who gave our lives to us, Who gave us 24 hours to spend each day?  We believe too often that we should be the arbitrator of what constitutes a good use of our time.  God says otherwise.

I have a series of hopes and dreams for my life, things I would like to do, goals I would like to accomplish.  I was hit last night by the very real thought that I may accomplish few or none of these.

Am I okay with that?  Can I deal with the fact that those things I consider important may never be accomplished by me?  Or can accept the fact that there are possibly more important things that God wants me to accomplish, carefully hidden in the guise of ordinary tasks I would disdain and interruptions that turn me from tasks I would rather do?

Ultimately our lives are not graded by what we accomplished for ourselves but what we accomplished for God.  And God is a good God - He gives us the opportunity to accomplish these things, sometimes pressing them into our lives  - cleverly disguised as the things which we interpret as interruptions.

The things we often call life.