About Time

Coffee filters. Hate ‘em. Well, not the filters themselves, of course – very useful things… necessary, even. No, it’s the running out that I hate. And not, perhaps, the running out so much as the sneaking up of the running out…of the coffee filters.

I don’t know (without going to look) how many coffee filters come in a pack. I am going to guess that we buy these things in lots of a hundred or so.

And I use one per day.

Easy math, right? The “last” filter means three months gone since the last, “last” filter. More than three months. What is that, 15 weeks? Give or take?

And what have I done with 100 days? Hmm?

I heard a sermon a year or so ago that must have caught me at or near coffee filter day. Our pastor was talking about time. He told a story about a man he knew who got so concerned about the manner with which he wasted time that he projected out how many years he likely had left, multiplied that number (40, let’s say) by 52, then filled a jar with a marble for every Saturday from today until, well, his… end.

That’s 2,080 marbles.

Each Saturday morning would start once the man removed a marble from the jar – his chance to measure the time he had left and ensure it was put to good use.

The man’s wife thought the whole thing was pretty morbid.

I’ve thought about that man quite a bit since then, on and off. The pastor was illustrating an idea from the Psalms where the speaker is asking that God “teach us to measure our days.” Why? So that “we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90)

Gain a heart. A heart of wisdom. A wise, experienced, knowledgeable, deep, full heart. A heart.

I actually think this man was gaining. I can envision that he was a person who had spent his days too freely -- or not at all. A man who might go to buy coffee filters and suddenly realize he couldn’t really remember anything important about any of the Saturdays from the past three months. A man who determined to be more determined about what each Saturday could be…and who maybe still chose to sit in a recliner now and again, but not for lack of consideration, first.

But I also thought of a different story about a man who stored up everything he owned and piled it in a secure place so that he could keep it safe and live off it forever. And to that man God said, “Fool…today your life will be taken from you. What good is all your stuff now?” (Luke 12) I wonder: how far apart is a jar of marbles from that big pile of stuff? A good ways, I guess. So long as the jar really is full of Saturdays.

I have an inkling that sometimes the jar is full of morbid fascination. And sometimes it is full of self-congratulation over, well, the very idea of the jar. Pride, we might call it. Sometimes it might be full of a few extra marbles that carried over from the last few marbles inadvertently missed and forgotten.

But…

If the jar really is what I hope it is -- what the man must hope it is -- I think it must be brimming with desire. Not desire to see days spent well or poorly. Not desire to “do Saturday’s right.” Not desire that gets caught up in the should-have’s of missed marbles or lost days.

No. Not that. Not the heavy, heavy burden of expectation (none so heavy as that placed on ourselves) that gets twisted and squeezed into a poorly defined term we falsely name “desire.”

Wise desire.

Desire that knows time is precious. Desire that has things to do because doing them is fearfully hard and wondrously rewarding. Desire that loves and helps and sacrifices. Desire that isn’t contained by the jar or the marbles, that isn’t so simple as a bucket list or a honey–do list or any, any, any list.

Wise desire. That wakens and does. That hungers when it is quiet. That must. Must! Even forgetting the marble. Even spending the last coffee filter. Even forgetting the heart...

…for a year.

(Thanks B.G.)