From the Pastor...
Charlie Brown sits down in front of Lucy’s psychiatric booth. The psychiatrist is in. “Trouble seems to follow me everywhere,” he says. “No matter where I go, I can’t seem to escape it.” Lucy leans back, puts her feet up and says, “What you need, Charlie Brown, is an unlisted life!” Sounds pretty good to me…an unlisted life. For there are days – there are months – when it feels like my life is way too “listed,” when it seems like I am frantically dashing from one activity or meeting or appointment to another. In those moments what I most want, at least what I think I most want, is more time - more time to fill in with more stuff. Time…I never seem to have enough. But is that true?
As summer begins I am thinking about time and how I spend my time. When I say I need more time, as I often do, what kind of time am I talking about? Do I need more time so that I can fill up all the empty boxes in my calendar? Or do I need a different kind of time, a different quality of time, a time that renews, refreshes, and even redeems me from the need to be so frantic all the time. In the words of poet, Michael Quoist, There is a big mistake somewhere.
The hours are too short, the days are too short, our lives are too short…
Lord, I have time, all the time that you give me.
The years of my life, the days of my years, the hours of my days,
They are all mine – mine to fill quietly, calmly…
To do conscientiously, in the time that you give me,
What you want me to do.
This summer I want to consider the wild and crazy idea that there may be more to life than increasing its speed and filling more of it up. I want to take back some of the sacred time that I have too easily surrendered to other gods. I want to re-discover the truth of these words written by Meister Eckhart over 700 years ago: “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by subtracting.”
Gene
