One Hour

They sat down behind me in church.  I heard, "Ok, we've got one hour!"  They went on to discuss all the rest of their plans for the day.  Nice things.  They didn't say they were headed to the casino to feed a gambling addiction, or that they were going out to the local bar to get soused, or that they had plans to rob a bank or commit some other kind of felony.  No, just normal things.  Things like picking up a daughter from one place and dropping a son off at another place.  Groceries that needed to be bought, and dry cleaning to drop off.

But I felt so sad.

They had one hour.

I'm not going to judge them.  But I do judge myself.  How many times do I do the same thing?  I have one hour.  One hour squeezed between work and running to the barn and taking the dog for a walk and responding to emails and cooking dinner and mopping the floor (which is perpetually covered with dog prints as big as my hand) and checking Facebook.  Nothing horrible.  Nothing shocking.  In fact, some of it is mighty fine stuff I'm doing, even stuff I'm doing for the Lord.  But in all that busyness, I wonder if what what I am really saying is, "Ok, God, you have one hour."

Is that what my faith means to me?  One hour, here and there, tucked between laundry and dishes?  Is my faith living my life with God tacked on?  What does it mean for him to be the centre?  For him to be my heartbeat?  It can't be a constant high.  There are days and weeks that my faith is putting one foot in front of the other.  There is no hype and fanfare, no fireworks or explosions, just, as Eugene Peterson calls it (and Nietzsche before him -- yes, I had to look up how to spell that), "a long obedience in the same direction".  But oh, how I pray that my whole life, my every heartbeat is devoted to that long obedience.  I hate the thought that my LORD becomes an aside, perhaps even an inconvenient aside, that I set my timer for him and when it rings, I run off to take the bread out of the oven, or switch the laundry to the dryer and cast him from my mind until the next hour.

I know, I've heard people who talk about doing the laundry for God, mucking out the horse barn for God, writing complicated accreditation reports for God, and so on.  I get that.  But really, it's hard to keep that kind of focus.  I start off doing laundry for God, and somehow, over time, it's just doing another load, and God gets lost somewhere between the rinse cycle and spin.  I'm not sure what it means, in really practical terms, on a day-to-day basis, to do my laundry for God.

But honestly, it leaves my heart absolutely bleak to think that my faith could become, or is becoming a blighted little thing that tucks God into a corner to be pulled out at convenient times, or even squeezed in at the least inconvenient times.  It makes me shudder to think that I could walk into God's presence and sit down and think, "Ok, God, you've got an hour."  I want to sit.  I want to linger.  I long to be in the presence of God.  And in those times when I don't want to sit or linger, I want to want that.  I wish for the longing to grow, not to wither and die.  I don't ever wish to be satisfied with an hour.  I think of Psalm 84, where the psalmist is jealous of the birds who nest in the temple, because they get to stay while he must leave.

"My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; 

my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God" (Psalm 84:2).

So I reevaluate.  I refocus.  I recommit.

Ok, God, you've got one life.