Making Time (Guest Blogger: Stephanie Grace Whitson)

Have you pondered the New Year and made your resolutions? Have you promised yourself that this year you will make it all the way through the One Year Bible and set aside time at least once a day for meaningful prayer? You will read to your children and catch up with the filing and remember every single friend’s birthday. With cake. Yes, you will bake cakes. And organize the pantry. And enlarge the garden so that you can raise your own tomatoes. And you will plan menus and stop using so much convenience food. You will switch to decaf and volunteer at the food pantry and finally, once and for all, get in the habit of a skin care regimen because you don’t want to wrinkle like a prune. Or Aunt Beatrice. Poor Aunt Beatrice. You really should visit her more often.

If you are like me, you’ve already despaired of not having enough time to do all the things you want to do. Author Anne Lamott talks about “time lost and found,” in a wonderful blog post that convicted me with the question: “at 80, will I be proud that I spent my life keeping my house cleaner than anyone else … or that I kept my car polished … or will I regret that I didn’t read to the kids enough. Or spend enough time with my grandchildren?” Someone much wiser than me once said that they doubted that a single man wishes he would have spent more time at the office when he is on his deathbed facing eternity.

Will we take time to “smell the roses” this year … or will time “get away from us.” I have learned one thing above all else about time in my sixty years of life: it flies … whether I’m having fun or not. When I look in the mirror, I am amazed. What happened to me? The answer is that TIME happened. And I should have savored it more.

And so, now that I am grown up, I’ve decided to learn a new game. It’s called savoring each moment. All my life I have been a list-maker. But lists can be tyrants. I’m going to refuse tyranny. Join me! Smell the roses … go to the art gallery … listen to a new kind of music … bask in the sunshine … notice the rainbows … listen to your friends … and have a great 2012.

It’ll be over before we know it. If you’re a young mother, here’s a poem (author unknown) my dear mother-in-law (she of the theme birthday parties and amazing crafting talents) shared with me once, when my four children were young and I was trying oh-so-many things including home-schooling and running a home-based business and writing novels and teaching women’s studies and gardening and canning and bread-making and being a church elder’s wife and … and … and. 

My dishes went unwashed today,
I didn’t make the bed.
I took his hand and followed
Where his eager footsteps led.

Oh, yes, we went adventuring,
My little son and I …
Exploring all the great outdoors
Beneath the summer sky.

We waded in a crystal stream,
We wandered through a wood.
My kitchen wasn’t swept today,
But life was gay and good.

We found a cool, sun-dappled glade
And now my small son knows
How Mother Bunny hides her nest,
Where jack-in-the-pulpit grows.

We watched a robin feed her young,
We climbed a sunlit hill …
Saw cloud-sheep scamper through the sky,
We plucked a daffodil.

That my house was neglected
That I didn’t brush the stairs,
In twenty years, no one on earth
Will know, or even care.

But that I’ve helped my little boy
To noble manhood grow,
In twenty years, the whole wide world
May look and see and know.