We run to the van, ready, but barely.
One last boy to buckle in and we can leave.
He makes it out the door and down the steps but I honk, because he’s left the door open.
We don’t have time to run in for the paper forgotten.
“You didn’t brush your teeth?” I exasperate in question.
A stick of gum passes to the back of the van.
Lurching into traffic, not dangerously, not recklessly, only selfishly. We find our place in line and sit at the red light in front of those who left earlier.
And I am still because I no longer have the option to hurry and I am dismayed at myself.
“This isn’t how it should be boys.” I break the chatter.
“When I look for opportunities to please myself, I lose the opportunity to serve others.
We should never be looking for ways to get out of responsibility. We should be looking for ways we can serve. Leaving late, destroys our opportunity to serve others. We don’t have time to let someone go first. We can’t. Every minute is already taken and we have to use them all for ourselves.”
This conversation is a continuation. It started at our house. At the grocery store. At church. Wherever we are, we are beginning to ask more often, “how can I serve?”
Putting away a grocery cart that was abandoned by another someone too busy.
Picking up the Styrofoam cup left under the chair in Sunday school, forgotten.
“It isn’t mine,” doesn’t hold weight, when we see how hollow it makes us.
“Being late,” I said, “might begin by sleeping too late, or earlier still, with getting to bed too late. It can be because we took too long eating, dressing or looking for a library book.”
It happens subtly, but it grows into something hard, difficult and obstinate.
Every time we look for a way out of responsibility, a way out of doing what we should be doing at the time we should be doing it, we are hindering our own goal to serve.
Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for everything. When we take the time we’ve been given to work and use it to watch TV, we are ultimately taking from our time to serve others. We are stealing from ourselves because fulfillment comes in serving, not in satiating our flesh.
The beauty of this is not just that they (8, 6 and 4) are getting it, but that I am too. It’s not a lesson to be learned once, it’s one to linger over and learn again and again.
Time isn’t money, time is love, service and gifts.
We don’t only live once, swimming through responsibilities to get through a bucket list of gratification. We live to die to ourselves…daily. We live to overflowing. We live to gain eternity and the Life that exceeds our imagination.
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” — Jim Elliot