Daily Dose 35: From Design to Reality

Do you feel like a performer balancing seven plates and four cups atop twirling sticks—all while juggling three balls on a tightrope?  Do you find yourself fondly yearning for when the semester will be finished….when the children will be out of diapers….when they will be out of school….when taxes are finished for another year…when inventory is done…or….

Knowing God has sprinkled cycles throughout our lives does not automatically mean we skillfully use those cycles to full advantage. Whether students, housewives, employees, church workers, or executives, we all face responsibilities and take part in activities that consume various amounts of our time. The reality is time spent for one purpose can NEVER be used for another purpose.

Unattended Flagpoles Bring Confusion

Instead of time cycles speeding us on our way, or rallying us to their flagpole, they seem to jumble into a confused heap of conflicting pressures and tensions. One responsibility barely reaches its specified deadline before it is back again for a fresh round of commitment and pressure.  We know in theory the English assignments, dirty diapers, and quarterly meetings are going to stop in some vague future someday, but our sense of perspective about their benefits, pleasures, and growth opportunities are often only fully realized (and, consequently, regretted) after the someday finally arrives.  We miss the children being home after they go to school, or get married.  We miss the opportunity to study and reflect after the schooling years are gone.  We miss the opportunity to minister to others after the busy seminar or conference.  When we were in those times all we could see was the grind, the routine, the pressures, the deadlines, the failures, glitches, and missed communications.

Such thinking is not the fault of time or its cycles, but faulty handling about what has been given. What more do we need to get our thinking on track?

Knowing How to Handle Time’s Flagpoles

The good news is that we do know what we need to know about time and priorities to make headway. We know time is valuable and expendable, temporal and eternal, cyclic and linear all at once. We must apply the executive oversight to apportion it in life to take full advantage of all its benefits.

In addition to knowing time’s contributions to the life puzzle, we also know our role within the family institution is a vital component of His plan for our growth and fulfillment as a person, whatever else we “do” as people.

We know God declared He was satisfied with Christ offering Himself to pay the sin penalty we are each born owing God.

We know Christ’s payment can be applied to our individual account, if we will only ask Him to do so.

We know when we do ask Him, we not only receive the promised forgiveness, but the Holy Spirit as teacher and power to move through the rest of our lives as He would: living through a divinely orchestrated balance of great eternal priorities with daily needs, individual compassion for others, and supernatural competence in personal responsibilities.

We  know that no matter how clever or innovative the human architect, whether Bruneschelli, Christopher Wren, Frank Lloyd Wright, or I. M. Pei, craftsmen had to take their tools in hand to turn the architects’ designs into reality.

What we may not know is we have tools we can use as well.

We have the Lord’s blueprint, now we need to move into the workshop and collect the time tools we need to craft His design into our life reality.