Holiday Time

It's the first official day of the school holidays and I woke up at 4:45. This is an improvement on other mornings as I have recently found myself staring at the ceiling at 3:03, 4:00 and 4:30. Although part of me resisted getting up at this hour today - I am meant to be on holiday - I find myself largely happy to reacquaint feet with slippers and begin my morning routine. I have finished a large cup of Lady Grey tea, met Jesus in Mark and a prayer liturgy, and have just opened my curtains to see pink clouds against the faintest blue sky. My cup runs over. 

The rest of the day lies open in front of me, and I am less sure about its contents and accompanying feelings. Two weeks seems like an awfully long time in theory, but in reality, they're already filling up with overdue catch-ups and Autumn cleaning and planning for the term ahead. I can feel a mild anxiety hovering over me any time I think about all I have to/would like to accomplish in the next couple of weeks. Plans have already shifted and had to be reworked, and two weeks now seems like a suffocatingly small amount of time in which to do that which simply needs to be done. 

Will I ever stop feeling like there's never enough time? I work so hard to parcel out my hours, ensuring that few, if any, are spent in idleness, and yet I still can't seem to get the calculus right. My intended bedtime rolls past and still the to-do list remains unfinished, despite the fact that I've been ticking things off since 5:00am. Tightness in my chest and whispers of you're not doing enough are near-constant companions as I wade through my overflowing days. I long to float. 

I know that my approach to time is all wrong. As Tish Harrison Warren discusses in Liturgy of the Ordinary, time is not something that's meant to be partitioned and distributed with furrowed brow to Things That Must Be Done. To even think that we can do such a thing is to fail to recognise that time is not ours, it's God's. Liturgical time and the church calendar are (meant to be) beautiful reminders that timelines are not ours to control, and our lives revolve around God's story and the story of the church. 

I have been thrilled to find that patience has, in recent years, become something of a flourishing resident in my life. I am calmer in the face of interruptions and more easily reconciled to even some big hopes and dreams not coming to fruition in timelines I would have chosen. And yet, I find that patience has yet to spread her tendrils into all of the nooks and crannies of my days. I am impatiently waiting for a friend to get back to me, and fighting the urge to read her silence with cynicism. I, the urger of giving "the most generous reading" to a situation, find myself fighting to do just that, and to allow patience to produce goodwill and empathy in me. 

Jesus is the keeper of my days, and my time. If I really believe that he knows the length and content of my life, my response should be to ask him to "teach me to number my days, that I may gain a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90). To do anything else is to resist the natural state of things, using precious energy to swim upstream when all that's required is to allow the current to carry me. Of course, surrendering is always a messy and repetitive process. My urge to control time and a smattering of apparent successes at doing so hinder me from giving up this flawed practice easily. But the Lord is patient with me, and he invites me again and again to let go and accept the good news that time really is his; his to control, his to portion, his to use to good ends. I'm slowly learning to believe him.