Skip to main content

my time



This is a picture Dean took in Cuba of the coral reef at the end of our beach - gorgeous when the waves crash against it, but sharp and impossible to walk on barefoot.

I had a job interview today. It went fine and the two men I was talking to were very pleasant and gracious. As they started to list the tasks and events I would be responsible for if I got the position, I started to feel a little anxious because I already had some plans for this spring and summer (good and noble plans like a weekend away with Dean and hopefully some travel to visit friends this summer) and this job with all its obligations might threaten to cut into these wonderful things that I really wanted to do. I decided the only thing to do was leave the matter in God's hands and trust him with whether or not I got the job, but a tiny concern was still there.

As I drove to the vacuum repair depot this afternoon, the real reason for my anxiety suddenly struck me: I believe that my time is my own to do with as I please and when my self-determined plans get threatened, I become anxious or annoyed. After only a few seconds of hesitation to make sure this was what I wanted to do, I told God, "My time is yours. Whatever you consider to be important at this point in my life and necessary for me to accomplish, I will do. I submit my plans to you and you can change or fulfill or rearrange them as you wish."

The anxiety left. Surrender really is the key to freedom from stress. God, my time is yours.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...
3 comments
Read more

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become.  Besides, I have studying to do.  But this weekend, something changed.  I read the book of Esther. First, some background:  the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years).  Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs.  This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments.  It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...
9 comments
Read more

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun.  I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading.  One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others).  Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding.  Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity.   In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007.   “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’   C...
10 comments
Read more