I've been thinking a lot about time lately, and how blessed I am to have so much of it right now. For as much as I really love my teaching job and the kids I get to see every day, I equally love that it comes with built-in time off. This Thanksgiving week has been a great vacation. I've spent time with family, decorated the house a little bit, had some friends over, took some time to get over the cold I had for the past 2 weeks, and so many other things.
So, even as I've been thinking about how grateful I am to have some extra time right now, there are some who have run out of time. Today I went down to the hospice in-patient unit to visit with a friend from church who doesn't have much time left. She has been fighting cancer, and fortunately her fight is almost over. Good because she's in a lot of pain, and the amount of medicine she's on makes her pretty out of it. Not good for her husband and her 2 young kids. As I sat there with her and just held her hand and prayed for her and her family, I was thinking about how we all end out time here on earth at some point. I was thinking about Grandma Bev and when she was in Hospice care. Thinking about what it was like to care for her in the last few weeks of her journey. Thinking about how sad I am for the husband and 2 young kids. Thinking about how blessed my time on this earth has been, and if I ended my journey today, that would be OK. Thinking about my sister and how sad she will be when her friend finally passes.
This whole week has been a gift of time, and then at the end of it I got a reminder that our time IS limited. We just don't know how limited it may be. As the thoughts of gratefulness and sadness and mourning and determination to make the most of my time all swirl about in my head, I hope that from now I choose to make my time worth it. Worth something. Worth talking about after I'm gone.
Serving at the Rescue Mission's Thanksgiving Dinner for the Homeless was a good start. But maybe I should not just focus on others once a year, but find ways to do that kind of thing more often.
Time is so precious.
K
It is so sobering to realize that we are all on borrowed time--we never know what life holds. How do we live to make our time worth something? Great question...that I think about too. I think a big part of it is in doing the "little" things...like holding the hand of a suffering friend. You used your time well there, K.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking a lot about that friend, too, since she's very near to the Carlson family heart. The other day the Christmas Shoes song came on and, although I've heard it a bazillion times, I started bawling. Anyway, I know it meant a lot to her and to the family for you to visit, and hold her hand, and I'm grateful for the reminder that, even though it's easy to get caught up in what we're doing with our time, that there are some things, no matter how "small", that are more meaningful than anything else.
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