Monday, February 6, 2012

Time is a Gift



There we were out there in the cold hunting around the side of a lookout mountain for....keys? No, sunglasses? No, a jacket? No! We were looking for a little bottle, others had already found it.  You find it, take out the little piece of paper and sign your name on it and the date then put it back where you found it and leave.
     It seems like I spend half my life looking for things, my keys, the check book, my purse, the school book that I'm supposed to be teaching out of RIGHT NOW, the shovel, my glasses, you name it, I've looked for it! So when my husband ask me if I wanted to go look for a hide and seek thing with his GPS I don't know what possessed me to say...."ok".  Off we went on this crazy adventure, getting little clues with the phone off of the internet. This is something you do with children to teach them to use a compass, and find GPS coordinates. With just us this is not using our time very productively.... so I thought.
     We found the first one without too much trouble. There was a certain hint of .... victory.  I had to run back to the car to get a pin so we could write the date and declare with the many others, "We were here and we were successful!" We rolled the pieces of paper up and put it back in to it's home, where it had been for years!       
     As we headed towards home, D asked the next question. "Daniel and I could not find the one in here," (my thoughts, he has time to do this with Daniel, why don't I have any time to do anything just for fun? And when did they do this?) "Would you like to go in and see if you and I can find it?" "Sure, why not," I say. He makes the turn into the cemetery and we go searching.
     We see babies burial grounds, 1 day old, 3 days old, I am grateful for my children and the time I get to have with them. Seeing graves dated back into the 1800s, suddenly makes it feels like we are on sacred ground. Carefully and respectfully we continue searching. We are there for 30 minutes and we can't find it. It's frustrating, has someone moved it? Why would they spoil it for someone else? Maybe it got washed away with the rain. "Wait a minute, what difference does it make? "Why are we wasting time here?" is a thought trying to come out of the logical part of my mind. As we prepare to write in on the web site and say can't find it D shows me some pictures...one is a little boy digging around inside the bush that we have just been walking around for 10 minutes. My competitive spirit jumps into my thoughts, "well if a little boy can find it, hmph!" "Well", I say, "if we need to dig inside the bush...we dig!" I start digging, pulling leaves out with my fingers, (that's why the little boy was digging, everyone else's hands were too big to fit between the branches). Within a few seconds I pull out a little 4 inch contraption and sure enough, it has papers rolled up inside. We've done it again, yay!
     Wait a minute, what exactly did we accomplish? Nothing; I could have had the dishes done by now, or the floor swept. Fortunately we went on our walk first and got our exercise in for the day. When did we start adding up our lives according to what we got accomplished that day? It wasn't "nothing". It was precious. It was time, with my husband, doing something he enjoys doing. It was being outside, instead of in here in front of a computer, it was his love language.
      I'm sure you've heard of the book, "The 5 love languages" by Gary Chapman. The list of 5 is this, Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Gifts, or Acts of Services. Today I spent time loving my husband with "Quality Time". It wasn't hard but it did cost me time and I had to be 'available'. And now that I'm looking back it was fun and it was time well spent. My husband has been on a diet, accepting little left over scraps from my time. I praise God that he has been patient, but he's been patient long enough. It's not easy, we are all busy trying to raise children, teach them and time is not something that we have an over abundance of. There is always going to be one more thing to do, but I personally have to be careful not to choose the good over the best. Today, at least for a few hours, my husband was my top priority and that will be happening more often.

No comments:

Post a Comment