Time Enough

I wrote a week or so ago about how I like to be active. Being active has a down side. When you're active, it means you have a lot of stuff to do. When you have a lot of stuff to do already, and then something happens where you have some extra stuff to do, well, life can get pretty hectic.

Now, please understand, this is not a complaint, nor is it a request for sympathy. All pastors lives get hectic sometimes. In fact, all people's lives get hectic sometimes. There's an old saying that nothing in life is ever evenly distributed. We all have times when it seems like everything happens at once.

When that happens, we can get a little frantic. I do, too, sometimes. I don't get frantic as often as I used to, though. You see, I've noticed something.

What I've noticed is that every time I look at all the things I need to do and think there's no way I'll ever get them all done, something happens. A project doesn't take as long as I thought it would. Someone comes along and, out of the blue, offers to do something for me. A deadline I thought was coming up right away gets pushed back. And, suddenly, I have some time that I wasn't expecting to have, and I have time to get everything done that I need to do.

This probably has happened all through my life, but when I really noticed it was when I started seminary. At that time, I was a part-time lawyer, a part-time pastor, and a full-time student. You might think, doing all that, there'd never be time to get it all done, but there always was. Every time I'd start to get scared that I'd never get it all done, something would happen so that I could. Time after time after time, so many times that I've long since lost count.

You can say this is a coincidence if you want to. I can't prove you wrong if you do. That's not what I think, though. I think this is God affirming the things I'm doing and helping me get them all done. I think this is God telling me that I'm on the right track—not perfectly, not all the time, but in general—and helping me do all the things I need to do. God rarely gives me extra time—at least in the sense I might like—but God always seems to give me time enough.

So, I don't get frantic about running out of time very often any more. Don't get me wrong, I still get concerned about it sometimes. But I don't very often get frantic. God always somehow gives me the time I need to get everything done. If I stay on the right track, I have every confidence that God will continue to do that.