I’ve heard it said that the greatest expression of love is time. How many of us waste it? How many of us clutch it tightly, guarding every little bit? It’s true that once your time has been given, it is gone. If you look at your life and calculate the areas in which you invest most of your time, would it make you stop and reevaluate? Understanding your time as an expression of what it is you love, would you find that you love an idol or would you be proud of what it said about you?
As a culture, we “don’t have a lot of time.” We remain busy and often over-stretched, over-booked and only momentarily fulfilled. We have the debilitating need to will our time away, listing our “to-do’s” and checking our calendars. We pour our time into a future that hasn’t happened yet- time that isn’t guaranteed. We plan, and in planning we build our expectations. How often are we disappointed by our carefully planned futures once they arrive? Could it be that we sometimes miss God’s provision in the moment because we’ve already created an expectation of how things ‘should’ go?
In Luke 17, Jesus is confronted by people demanding to know the time in which the Messiah will come. I always imagine him chuckling and sort of shaking his head before he says, “The Kingdom of God is already among you.” Jesus didn’t miss the blind man in the crowd because he was slated to teach at the Temple at 3:00 sharp. He didn’t hurry past the lepers because they hadn’t made it on to his “to-do” list. Each moment that Jesus lived, each moment that he had, was an opportunity to love.
Like then, even now, the Kingdom of heaven is among us. I pray we don’t miss it as we schedule and worry and prepare for the Christmas season. God’s moments and God’s opportunities so often come in the here and now. Open your eyes, open your heart, force yourself into the present and see if you notice it.
Where do you notice God’s Kingdom among us?