The calendar is bittersweet. I need a reminder. I need to be told what I have to do each day. The mornings that I rebel against the calendar and I refuse to look at it when I open the fridge are the mornings that it never fails I receive a call asking me where I am at and I hear myself apologizing and begging for another opportunity for the meeting I missed. The worst was this year when I forgot about my 3 year olds school party. There was no call, only my daughter’s disappointed eyes telling me when I picked her up that next time I would have to come because all the mommies were there. I was the only mommy missing. It’s moments like that that I cannot reschedule no matter how much begging I manage to fit in. The calendar keeps me on track, it makes sure that I get where I need to be when I need to be there. But the calendar also confines me, seizes my freedom and the freedom of my family.
The calendar, as helpful as it is, runs my life. Having my time mapped out in front of me on a piece of paper almost always binds me to incessant work and obligations. More often than not I find myself filling in the blanks and squeezing all that I can into that one little inch called a day. It’s not unusual for me to see an open spot and try my hardest to fill it. It is almost as if the calendar is calling me to not let a moment of it go unused or wasted. The calendar does not just run my life: it is my life, etched out in detail on little squares, beckoning me to buy a bigger calendar with bigger squares so that I might have more time to do more things. I would have a two-inch day instead of a one-inch day.
Sadly, for me my calendar is full every day, seven days a week. My weekdays full of doctor appointments, school obligations, recitals, taxi-ing of children, church activities, etc.; my weekends, including the Sabbath, full of church, parties and housework. As I said above, I stand at the fridge sometimes begging God for strength to get me through to the next open day and I pray that I can resist the urge to fill it before it arrives.
I suppose that anyone living in America that reads this today would sympathize with the endless call of the calendar that daily haunts me. Our society has become so driven to constant activity that we all work to the point of collapse and then just keep going, surviving only on the caffeine injection from our Starbucks Venti Mochas or Monster Energy drinks. Looking back over what I’ve already written, I’m left with the simplest of questions: why? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why, when even the God of the universe took a day to rest after creating it all, do we think ourselves different than Him and continue to run ourselves ragged bowing to the idol called our calendar?
In her book, Receiving the Day, Dorothy C. Bass confronts this very issue: the gift of time. Time is a gift from God. “The first act of God is to create light and, seeing that it is good, to separate it from darkness. This is the beginning of time, which from that moment on bears the forms of Day and Night, as God’s first gifts are repeated again and again…Through this lens we also discover the Sabbath and understand that God intends for us to have time to rest as well as for work.”[1]
Bass cleverly reminds her readers how to receive each day anew by offering ways that “enable Christians to offer attention, daily, to the gracious presence and activity of God.”[2] Awakening to each new day with a God-centered perspective, thanking Him for all that we have and for giving all that we need, not being reminded of the unchangeable past and not worrying about the unpredictable future, but living each day for itself. “When the day brings suffering, enduring this day’s suffering, not dreading next month’s deterioration, is the necessity of this day. When the day brings testing or opportunity, to meet this free from bondage to the past or dread of the future is this day’s urgency. Jesus taught his disciples to ask God for bread for this day, not for all of them.”[3] It is when we look at each day in this way that we can ask ourselves “Where did I meet God today?” and actually have an answer, instead of not even having the energy to ask the question. Some of her tips for receiving this day include: honoring our body with cleaniless, healthy eating habits, exercise, sleep and rest; offering of attention, whether to our children at our feet or to the breeze rustling trees; praying with regularity; saying “no” when asked to unnecessarily fill our time; and unmastering the day by learning that the only interruptions to our days are really the moments that we have written on our calendars.
Overall, Receiving the Day is an extremely down-to-earth recipe for recapturing the gift of time that God has so graciously given each of us.
If you need a good book to read this summer and maybe some ideas for how to reclaim the time God has given you, pick up Receiving the day. It's a quick read and full of great insight!
[1] Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 4.
[2] Bass, 19.
[3] Bass, 25.
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