I’m in a hurry a lot. I find myself often thinking that I could get more done IF it didn’t take me so long to get from A to B. So I tend to run from place to place, to work, from work. This morning I was running back from my workout feeling some time pressure to get home faster, in order to make breakfast on time for the kids. I’d gotten up a bit later than usual, worked out faster than normal and was now trying to get home more quickly…thinking if I ran a little faster, I could be home more quickly…wishing I could ‘transport’ myself, so that it would be faster. I then realized I couldn’t run that much faster anyway and, afterall, it would only save me a minute or two. Besides what would be lost in a minute or two? Perhaps there is a reason why I have to put up with time…the time it takes to do things, to get places. What is behind my impatience with time anyway?
It dawns on me that there is an assumption I am making about what all I need to get done…and that there might be far less that needs to get done than I tend to think. My mind, with the benefit of my running time, wanders to my recent contemplations on love and I notice something familiar about this situation and how I tend to view love. For example, I often think that love is something that I need to do better and learn faster. Why is that? Would love even conform to such a thing…as compression? There is, afterall, something elusive about love…as if it is not to be fully captured…especially not by hurrying to it, hurrying through it.
It strikes me that one of the pre-dominant challenges of love is that it is something that you have to wait for, wait in. And then, my mind pops, “Love is patient.” What does it take to be patient? Experience mostly; whatever it takes, it seems to take a while. Why experience? Because experience gives us understanding. It teaches us to be willing to be patient, to wait, because it knows something important happens in the process of waiting. I suspect we have to experience the limitations of hurry and the benefits of the lessons time teaches us. And as we learn, we are willing to wait because we know it is better to do so…to trust in something happening that you can’t see in any given moment. Love is patient.
And, I am thankful, even if prematurely, for the limitations of hurrying…that time has much to teach us, that minutes don’t matter as much as we think, that an inconveniently longer than desired run can give me the many gifts of thought, and wonderings, and waitings on God for His timing in things.
