TIME is a killer. We are all withering, and yet we do not value such truth in the way that it demands that we value it. And yet, if we value it as we should, we still regret it.
We had 179 hours with the body of our stillborn son, but it was not enough. It could never be. But there’s also the fact that what we did in those precious few hours we had with him we just repeated over and over because he was lifeless.
I contend that making the most of no time, not a literal outline, is simply about doing just that. It is about seeing how time escapes, irrevocably and irremediably.
And what are we left with once it’s all gone?
The memories we have made, the trinkets saved, the sadness that we retain that surely is a gift from God that makes us feel in ways to heal, and the fact that we have shared this experience.
As consumers of grace, we have taken this gift both from Nathaniel’s little body and from the time we had. we had it. We took it and had no problem making the most of it.
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We think we have time, but we have no time at all.
Life changes in a fraction of a second, though it took us decades for the abruptness to betray our attention. Then life is a steep and steely lesson. We will all be caught this way at least once in our lives.
But now, making the most of any time is not as easy as we think it will be.
Not all of our future problems can be foreseen like the finitude of the time we had with Nathanael. We can have our ideas about the wise use of time and make a bad judgment, spending our efforts on activities that we think are worthwhile, but are not, as revealed later.
But it is not much use to repent, although repentance comes in function of a sad truth.
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Making the most of no time. What are we going to do?
By wisely discerning the selection and use of time, we remind ourselves that we are making an eternal choice.
Time is God’s gift of grace to experience, and experience is God’s grace in time: an eternal gift.
Time is not the husband of repentance, but if we lack diligence, our time comes to eternally join repentance.
Time is the brother of experience. Such brothers take each other very seriously.
To spend time with one eye on the possibility of regret is to fix the other eye on making the most of the present.
© 2015 SJ Wickham.
