Getting Ready to Receive, Day 2

I don’t know about your house, but in ours there is a constant battle between the feelings of “No time, there’s NO TIME!” and “Eh, there’s plenty of time to do that later.” For some reason, we always drift to the extremes instead of meeting in the middle. Sound familiar? The good news is that perhaps it’s not the middle we need, but a good dose of both extremes.

You see, I think we need both. We need the urgency to remind us that our days are numbered and we need to make the most of them, i.e. not living in dissension and jealousy, but rather clothing ourselves with Christ. We also need the wisdom and patience to recognize that so many of the things eating our time are not the necessary things, and they indeed can wait until later while we spend ourselves (all the way into debt) loving each other.

It’s true what they say that our kids will not remember the gifts they got at each Christmas, but they will remember the love and the laughter. Sure, they don’t realize it when they’re young so of course they’re going to count the days wishing they would go by faster and making their lists of want, want, wants. But while they wish the hours away and we feel the hours slipping from our grasp, we can make them all count.

Here’s an idea: Choose one thing today that you can put off for another day and before that time gets eaten by all of the other starving items on your list, do something today that has no value outside of the love it shares with someone else. It can be as simple as the text message you send to your spouse that says, “You matter to me and I love you so much,” or it can be the plate of store-bought cookies (because who has time to bake?) that you drop off at your neighbor’s house (you know, the one whose name you can’t remember) on your way home.

Give love today. You’ll always miss the time you waste, but you’ll never miss the love you give!

How’s your love debt? What did you give today?