My daughter could spend all day playing if she could, and why not? It makes sense to live for playtime when you are 3 years old! I have learned as a parent to give her a head’s up when she needs to wrap up her play to do basic things like get ready for school, use the potty, brush her teeth, or take a nap. I will say something like, “Quinn, you have 5 more minutes of playtime before it’s time to sit down for breakfast.”
Her response is always the same: “That’s a long time!”
It doesn’t matter if I tell her she has 20 minutes or 2 minutes. She always accepts the remaining time given to her as a gift, her eyes light up with wonder, and she gleefully gets back to her play.
Like I said, she’s three. Her capacity to understand the difference between 5 minutes and 10 minutes is limited. She doesn’t yet comprehend that 60 seconds add up to a minute and 60 minutes add up to an hour and 24 hours make one day.
All she has is her previous experience with the time frames handed to her. In her mind and in her limited history, she has never run out of time or found herself pining for more. She has enough. Time to her is a gift and one filled with endless opportunities.
Mostly, I fail to see what my daughter sees when I look at my own schedule. I peruse my to-do list, responsibilities, commitments, desires and pursuits and then look at the hours I allotted to these in any given day and usually feel as though I am lacking time. I go through most days feeling rushed, in a hurry, frustrated by what I am not getting to that I wish I could devote more time to, and ending my days stressed about all the things I didn’t have time for that still need to get done.
Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I looked at how much time I had in a day or week or month or even year, and said, “Wow! Thank you, God, for giving me this much time! It’s a lot!”
I’m not a betting woman, but I’d place my money on the fact that you probably view your time a lot more like me than like my daughter.
Maybe, that’s limiting us more than we realize. What if we are sacrificing our peace at the altar of hurry? What if we are depleting ourselves of mental and emotional energy needlessly? What if our approach to problem-solving each day lacks creativity and innovation because we see lack instead of abundance? What if we are placing glass ceilings on our personal growth simply because we view our time through the lens of constraints instead of opportunities? And what if we are missing out on the joy that comes with gratitude because we are stuck in a pattern of complaining and grumbling over what we don’t have instead of thanking God for what has given us?
Maybe it’s time to take a cue from my daughter and practice some childlike faith when it comes to our response to the hours we’ve been entrusted.
This week, why not thank God for the time you have been given? Instead of trying to get it all done and continually being disappointed or self-depricating when it doesn’t… Why not ask the Holy Spirit what is most important? Ask God to lead you and to help you use your time wisely and joyfully. At the end of each day, maybe the laundry got done, and maybe it didn’t. Maybe you got caught up on your emails or maybe you still have a few dozen or hundred unread emails sitting in your inbox. Maybe you got to complete that work project or maybe it’s still in-process.
What matters most is not how much you accomplished in the time given to you, but that you embraced that time as a gift from God and treated it as such. You didn’t get it all done, but you did faithfully steward what the Lord had given you. Because you looked at your calendar and saw possibility instead of limitations, opportunity instead of constraints, you were able to see how the Lord is moving in your life and discern His voice and leading. You found His presence in your every day, and because God was in your midst, your “not enough” became “more than enough”.