Sunday, November 7, 2010


Go to work in the morning
and stick to it until evening without watching the clock.
You never know from moment to moment
How your work will turn out in the end.
Ecclesiastes 11:6 (The Message)

Twice a year we go through this. Early in the evening, my husband sets most of the clocks in the house, either forward or backward, and I spend the rest of the night not knowing what time it is. I wake up in the morning still not knowing. Because I always change the clock next to my side of the bed last.

It is November, so we set the clocks back and then people say we gain an hour. Gain an hour? How does that work? I can never figure it out. Just because I can stay in bed an extra hour and it turns out to be the time I normally get up, it doesn’t mean that I really gained an hour. To me, that says we have time travel.

I do obsess about time way too much to the point that I drive myself nuts sometimes.

When I was in Africa, we learned the following saying. “Americans have clocks, Kenyans have time.”

Wow! How I wish I could throw away all the clocks and just have time! The problem is that I have so much to do every day that I feel I have to continually time myself so that I can get it all done. But you know what? The work will still be there tomorrow. Or maybe the work just wasn’t that important in the first place.

What is important is getting my priorities straight. All this “stuff” that I think I need to do? It really doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is that I take time every day to work on my relationship with that Lord. Because that will matter in the end.




Maybe Germans are even more obsessed with time than us Americans. Or Val, when she was in Germany two years ago, was just obsessed with taking a picture of every clock tower she saw.

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