Time is Running Out!

We settled into our seats as we delicately arranged our laptops on the small, circular coffee table. It was a Friday afternoon and our language class had been cancelled that day, freeing us to catch up on our work from the comforts of a new and unfamiliar coffee shop. Things were shaping up to be a slower and more restful wind-down to the week. Hardly an hour into our time there however, we receive a call from one of our close local friends, announcing that she had officially submitted her resignation from the company we work at. It had been a long time coming and there had been signs and hints of the frustration and tensions brewing for months already. Yet now that it was really happening, it felt like a very real shift in our current work and relationship dynamics. While obviously being in a different workplace does not mean that we cannot continue having a friendship with this person, yet it is undeniable that things wouldn't be the same now that we won't see each other on a near-daily basis and the opportunities for conversation and life-on-life interaction would be drastically reduced.

This realization set in a sense of even greater urgency. Time is running out to share the good news with this person! We've got limited opportunities left so we ought to make the most of the time that we do have left - actively seeking and asking for opportunities, and boldly speaking truth into her life. It was interesting to take a step back and ponder why it is that we don't necessarily view all of our relationships in life with the same level of urgency. Why is it sometimes so easy for us to fall into complacency in our relationships, daily putting off the work of verbally sharing the father's love till tomorrow? Perhaps sometimes we just take it for granted the time that we have with the people around us and we just assume that things will just stay the same. "We'll always have tomorrow," we reason to ourselves until suddenly tomorrow comes and time has run out. If in the future we find ourselves with these people before the Father, would we be able to confidently say that we have told them everything that they needed to know?

Even as we grasped at this renewed sense of urgency over the coming days, the Father had another important lesson to remind us. While a healthy sense of urgency is necessary, it's also too easy for that to spiral into an arrogant notion that it all depends on me. The Father's project has become my project and now I am the one in control, so I better make sure I am moving all the pieces to make sure things happen according to my planning. Just as He asked Job in chapter thirty-eight, He also asks us, "Where were you when I created and formed this person? Where were you when I knit them together in their mother's womb? Where were you in the years of their childhood, through the times of grief and suffering that they have experienced? Can you turn a heart of stone into a heart of flesh?" 

It is a delicate balance that we are still trying to learn, often with much failure. Thankfully, the Fathers in the business of drawing all hearts towards himself, including that of our own.