Time

In case you didn't know from previous posts, I love Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts. One of my favorite parts is posted below, excerpts from page 66-69.

From the time the alarm first rings and I stir on our pillows, touching, stretch over his back and check those relentless hands keeping time on that clock. The time, always the time. I am an amateur trying to beat time. The six kids rouse. We race. The barn . . . and hurry. The breakfast . . . and hurry! The books the binders . . . and hurry! In a world addicted to speed, I blur the moments into one unholy smear. I have done it. I do it still. Hands of the clock whip hard. So I push hard and I bark hard (yup, that sounds like me!) and I fall hard and when their wide eyes brim sadness and their chins tremble weak, I am weary...

The hurry makes us hurt. 

I speak it to God: I don't really want more time; I just want enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done... yesterday. In a world with it's "live in the moments" buzz phrase that none of the whirl-weary seem to know how to do, who actually knows how to take time and live with soul and body and God all in sync? To have the time to grab the jacket off the hook and time to go out to all air and sky and green and time to wonder at all of them in all this light, this time refracting in prism. 

I just want time to do my one life well.

Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: when I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I'm always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slows. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time's river slows, slows, slows. 

This is were God is.

In the present. I AM ~ His very name. I want to take the shoes off. I AM, so full of the weight of the present, that time's river slows to a still... and God Himself is timeless. This supreme gift, time, God Himself framed in moment. I hardly breathe . . . and time is only the essence, because time is the essence of God, I AM. 

This I need to consecrate: time.