Russellings of the Spirit

The excited bride-to-be does it one way.

The six year-old waiting for Christmas does it another way.

The man waiting for his spouse to return from military service, still another.

And even though some of us do it without giving it a second thought, we still do it.

All of us – in our own way – mark the passing of time.

Sometimes days and hours seem endlessly long. At other times they seem ridiculously short.

As a child, I remember being extremely annoyed by the first week of the month of December. I am sure my annoyance was caused by the fact that both my birthday and Christmas come toward the end of the month. I was very excited for both of them to arrive and yet here we were… still stuck in the part of the month marked by single digits! It seemed as if someone had secretly inflated every day of early December from 24 to 48 hours because each day just DRAGGED ON FOREVER!!

Of course as rational people we know that one day is exactly as long as the next. Its length doesn’t expand or contract according to our moods. But as people who live our lives and encounter various people, events and emotions constantly, time’s passage seems to be stretched, compressed, or warped accordingly.

I often wonder; how might time feel if we could treat each of those minutes as a GIFT instead of treating it as a GIVEN? This is, after all, the “… day the Lord has made…” And because this day – like the one that came before it – is divinely authored, it might make sense to regard it reverently.

In the church we celebrate Advent as a time of waiting and watching. We wait and watch for something that is not here yet… something whose arrival time we pretend not to know and yet something that will be wonderful to behold when at last it appears.

As we wait and watch for the gift that is coming, though, let’s not overlook the wonder and astonishing preciousness of the gift that has already arrived… the gift of today.

“This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

– Psalm 118:24.