crazy time {and the truth that will get us through it}
This is such a crazy time, isn’t it?!
In the end, it is something in every way tiny–a broken hairband, actually, popping and snapping against my fingers–that finally breaks my resolve. It’s always that way with a slow crumble. Millions of rips–unseen, unheard, unhealed–weaken the muscle until finally the barest graze finishes the work.
I stand behind Riley’s chair, sliding a braid between my fingers, and I’ve already lost the feel of her hair–the way the morning light falls on the crown of her head–to the rush of time. I imagine a ticking I don’t hear, sand leaking clear out of an invisible—but looming–hour glass and onto the floor at my feet. Time, it threatens to swallow me. I lean over and with one free hand, I scoop a bite of egg onto my fork and deliver it–quickly, now–to my mouth. I still need shoes–the slippers on my feet won’t do for the clog of traffic on our morning commute–and we are already running behind. Adam wanders in a looping ‘8’ that by now must be worn into the carpet between the living room and the kitchen, his bookbag hanging crooked from his shoulder, bouncing rythmically against his right hip. He’s ready. As he passes me, I catch his deep whisper: It’s time for school, he’s saying, over and over and over as he walks.
“Everyone ready?” I ask, though I’m not really yet ready myself.
Adam stops mid-stride and looks at me, because even he can see I’m not done with braid, that I still have to pin it against Riley’s head. Zoe looks sullenly at her plate and shakes her head. No. She doesn’t like to finish breakfast in the car. Nevermind that I might not finish mine at all, that the plate will be cold by the time I make it back home.
I was up in the still dark in time to pray, every thought scattered and dangling, please help cluttering all the pauses. Without His hands touching my eyes there’s only blindness, and how’s a mother even to walk if she can’t see in front of her? But time, it leaks away, and even though the conversation never really ends I wasn’t ready to move away from that singular focus. I still felt vulnerable, knotted, blurred. But I had to make breakfast, wake up the children, write a schedule, change an insulin pod, pack the lunches. I had to touch and feed and teach and love, and the hurry, hurry, hurry came with the thick fog I saw at first light, like cotton dulling sound, obscuring my view of what God does.
And now, I can run up the stairs and grab my shoes and hurry to the car and through the fog and into the disappearing dots of headlights and brake lights–I can feel my way, half-blind, through the rest of the rush—if I can just…if I can just. And that’s when the elastic pops, cracking like a whip against my fingers. I feel the impatient heat bubbling, like lava rising into my throat. I reach for Riley’s hand, pressing her fingers there, and now you hold it tight, tight while I get another. I turn, thinking already of the elastic in my fingers. But that sand runs out all over my slippered feet and Adam whispers “it’s time for school” again and again and again and I stop without even thinking and whack my flat hand against a stool at the bar–just one loud, horrible crack, a fissure widening–before I walk on. The children—all three—gasp, and my hand stings. Immediately I regret the eruption, the gesture directed at no one–at maybe only my own powerlessness–suddenly felt by all. So again I pray–help please–and not because it is the only thing I can do, but because it is the only powerful thing to do.
As I reach for what I need to finish Riley’s braid, as I twist that elastic carefully–quickly–around the soft, brassy strands, this is what He says, whispered right into my jerking pauses:
My deliverance arrives on the run, my salvation right on time. My setting things right will never be obsolete. You see, at just the right time, while you were still powerless, Christ…
At just the right time, Christ. My deliverance arrives on the run. And that’s when the truth rests like a hand on my shoulder: Time doesn’t leak, not anymore, not since His baby cries made a Kingdom out of a barn, not since the Lord over time entered the press of time to redeem every time for all time. These days, time comes and with it, He comes. In the end, it was something–someone–in every way tiny who changed the course of things.
Maybe Mary wondered—traveling all that way for the census full pregnant and ready–how in the world this untimely mess could be what God had promised. When the first pains gripped her body and she stopped to twist a hand in her clothes and it seemed not hardly the place or the time for this, maybe she also wanted to stand outside of the throbbing, hurried knot of it. But what seems way out of control is always under His control. I wonder how long it took for His own mother to figure out that He was Lord at every time–not just the sweet together times or the powerful times or the everything-feels-under-control times but also the ugly times; the vulnerable times; the unraveling times; the hurried times; the running, scary times; yes, even the painful, hard-suffering, sacrificed times. He is Lord of our flat smacked cracked times, too, and time doesn’t empty out beyond His power. It doesn’t matter how things seem–for we live by faith, not by sight; it only matters that He’s Lord all the time, every time, for all time.
This is the always, no-matter-what Truth that comes holy and for all of us, right smack in the craziest time of the year:
He is Lord over time, all the time.
