When she was through, her chubby hands and face giving her smallness away were covered with a gooey chocolate layer. She’d just eaten an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie, still soft and warm from the oven, in that distinct way toddlers do, not caring about proper protocol or mess-factor. Miraculously, her golden curls were spared from goo.
As I toted my little bundle off to get changed into pajamas, I saw that she desperately needed a bath. But it was too late, and this mama was tired. It had been a long day. Plus, I’d already supervised four showers just before passing out cookies. I didn’t have it in me to attend to another. My chubby, gooey girl could take a bath in the morning.
As a substitute, we settled for getting clean with the help of some wipes. I took one and she took one. We wiped and giggled as we swept the sticky stuff away. Then she began to wipe my face, not understanding that her face had been the only messy one. In that moment, of course it didn’t matter. What mattered was the freeze-frame worthy handful of seconds with my baby. Who, at that time, was the soon to be potty-trained — our family out of diapers forever baby.
And then all at once, I felt the desire to jump for joy and cry because time is fleeting.
Time. We’re consumed with time. And for good reason. It is important.
Time seems to slip away when we’re enjoying things. And at other instances, it doesn’t move fast enough. We’re always thinking in increments of time.
It’s the hurry-up and slow-down-already juggling act we love to hate. I don’t know if the pull to want time to be still or the push to want time to speed up will ever disappear from our way of thinking. I guess it’s the way we’re wired. But there is one thing I do know about time.
It’s that we’re to make the most of it.
Teach us to make the most of our time, so that we may grow in wisdom. – Psalm 90:12
I highly doubt that the Psalmist meant for this to mean scratching the most items off our bucket lists, or being ultra productive to get ahead.
I believe he’s talking about the sacred work we’ve been given to do. The work that is etched into our very beings — the things God had in mind for us to set our gaze toward.
