Setting Your Clock to the Rhythms of Life

Photo by MIO ITO on Unsplash

Standing in front of that counter on New Years Eve, I had only one thought in my mind. "How big of an explosion would that firework make?" I remember the anticipation as we picked the fireworks from the little corner shop in the town of Huacalera in Northern Argentina where I grew up. Around the world, many people celebrate the arriving of a new year with fireworks and cheers.

In more recent years I've notice another staple of the year end. Read the news on New Years Eve and it will almost always feature a famous death announcement. That seems so strange to me. So much talk of death as a new year is born. But it is a well documented phenomenon. More people die in December and January than other months of the year. This year it was Barbara Walters, Pele and Pope Emeritus Benedict. Last year it was Desmond Tutu and Betty White. 

While days, weeks and months can seem like arbitrary numbers we have assigned to organize our time, ever since God organized Creation, we have been bound to time. The seasons of nature and of our lives keep time and submit to it. 

There is something comforting about that and it also disturbs me. I'm comforted by the consistency and patterns that time provides but disturbed by their control over me. Time is this unseen force that governs much of my life and for which I have little to say; except how I use it. For instance, I can't make more time. Every minute, hour and day are already made. But I can use time. 

I wonder if our fascination with New Year's resolutions comes from this heightened awareness of time we get around the new year. Most resolutions have to do with productivity in using time . . . more time for exercise, the family, reading books, etc. As the year passes and another is born, we seem to be most out of control. But in that moment we exert what little influence we have to make ourselves promises about the year to come. 

Fireworks are one way of making a mark on the unyielding passage of time; New Year's resolutions another. But either way the time will pass and we will be looking back at another year gone by. 

Maybe its time for us to start looking at our relationship with time in some new ways. We seem to know that the end of the year is a worthy time to wrap up a life and a good time to set a new pattern. But what if New Years was the time we planned out how we would be generous with our time in the coming year? 

Imagine if we committed our new 365 days to God on New Year's Eve and asked Him how we might give freely of that time to those He has put in our lives. I wonder what our year would look like, how would it be spent? What a thought . . . to harness time and turn it into a gift to God, those we love and people He brings into our path. It is a worthy thought as we begin this new year!