Beloved,

It happens all the time that I preach a sermon, and in the process of trying to articulate what I want to say, I often find I have at least a whole ‘nother sermon to preach by the time I’ve filled my 5-7 double spaced pages. What to do with all the extra material?

Sometimes what I find doesn’t get into the sermon is the “how-to” part that goes with whatever I’m preaching about. Now, maybe you don’t need your preachers to tell you how-to. Maybe you ran away from church originally for just that reason:  altogether too much telling you what to do. But maybe, maybe, you would like some advice–that you can take, tweak, or ignore–some homework, as it were.

Couple days ago I preached sermon on Sabbath, and the use, and abuse, of time. The sermon that got left out, the how-to, is something like this:   there are two ways to handle our abuse of time. We can essentially approach it the way newbies to Weight Watchers approach food, or Debtors Anonymous adherents approach money:  the fearless reckoning of calories, or dollars and cents. See where all that time is GOING, then set priorities, make decisions, cut down on the fat.

This is certainly redeeming, and effective, and probably necessary for most of us, as a starting point. But if we are going to stay sabbathly-fit, if we are not going to revert to our old habits of squandering and dissipating, we can’t stay on a time-diet forever. We have to learn to live in time in a way that we love, for its own sake–not because it’s ‘good for us.’

This, I’ve been discovering, is not so much about what we do with days or hours, but with minutes. Micro-calories of time, if you will. For me, it comes down to the art of lingering. I’ve gotten so much joy over the last couple months from not-rushing, which has made me, paradoxically, on time much more of the time. Lingering also means I get to notice a lot more beauty, pay attention to strangers in a way that makes me more compassionate and prayerful toward all humans. I get to hear what my kids are actually saying, because I am listening, and I laugh a lot more than I did before. So:  can I invite you to linger? To buffer your time between here and there, between this phone call and that errand and the other appointment, with some pointless, beautiful lingering? All that will seep in around those edges, is God-given.

I’ll be lingering at the Diesel, tomorrow morning from 8 to 10a. Hope you’ll linger with me.

Christlove,
Molly