Time and the Engineering of God (the musings of an orthodox rebel)

"Arise, shine...." Is. 60:1

What are you doing with the time that you have been given, with the moments that God has engineered in your life? I am not talking about some general, abstract sense of "your life," but rather your immediate circumstances, the here and now. Are you filling up these current moments with what God has given you to do (no matter how great or small), or are you wasting time by moping and whining about what "should" or "could" be (or even what will be)? When it comes to practical energies and endeavors, "should" and "could" are always a snare. When action is called for, it is no good to suddenly deliberate about whether or not circumstances should or could be better and subsequently whether or not your efforts will succeed. Such concerns will leave you paralyzed, and thus make the here and now even more frustrating. You must not fix your focus on the formless future; keep it on the present moment with its more defined lines and edges. Keep your energies on the right now where you can actually do something (even small things); tomorrow is none of your business (Matt. 6:34). Most importantly, keep your eyes on God, on His presence and promises.

What glorious wasters of time we are! God has called us to a specific purpose. He then engineers our immediate circumstances to aid (in some way) in that purpose. However, we wrongly consider our circumstances. We see them as a detriment to God's purpose, or we don't see them at all and thus don't capitalize on them. In either case, we have set our gaze on some imagined future situation that we feel we must wait for, and as a result we get stuck in the mud. "Oh, but I must wait until this or that falls into place before I can do anything." If you don't start doing something(s) now in the small and quiet moments, then you will surely do nothing when ideal circumstances come, if they come at all. "Oh, but what's the point? I am not doing anything that matters right now." If that is so, then it is because you are not doing it. Everything in our lives is engineered by God to fulfill His purpose in our lives (Rom. 8:28). If you say that you believe that, then what are you doing with the current moments that you have been given? How are you using the tools at your disposal, even (and especially) the small or strange ones? If you are blessed right now with inordinate free time, are you filling it up on some level with what you are meant to do? If you are in odd or hard circumstances right now, what are you learning? Are you learning? Or are you filling up your time with nothingness while you simultaneously cry about the nothingness?

Epithet: Do not waste one drop of time that God has given to you. It was given for a reason.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2010