Start and Finish -- part 1

 

I start my run each day in a particular place.  There is always some sort of starting line, rarely marked on the asphalt.  Whether an out-and-back trail along the river, or a hilly loop or two through the forest, I always come back to where I started.

But I always return a little different, no matter the terrain or how much time has passed.  What have I seen along the way, what have I thought about, how have I prayed?  I have been changed by that passage between start and finish. 

Something has changed, even incrementally, by what I have chosen to do in that pocket of a few minutes or an hour or whatever time I have that day.  As Tish Harrison Warren says in her book Liturgy of the Ordinary, "...very subtly, my day was imprinted differently."

There is no wasted time.  Just what we do with it.  And how we are changed by it.

It is not our place to label or distinguish between the significant or insignificant -- because everything we do is a game changer in some astonishing way -- whether writing a book or folding someone's laundry who won't even notice, speaking before thousands or making a little child's lunch  (which in the Bible fed five thousand hungry strangers.) 

My times are in His hands.... Psalm 31. 15   

I have only to be faithful.  Faithfulness may not change what I am doing.  But I can't help but be changed by it.

How do I choose to spend these moments today between start and finish?  Invest them?  Or catch up on instagram?   I had a short span of unconnected minutes this morning, like unexpected loose coins in my pocket,  not very long, about a cup of coffee's worth, but I was conscious of using them, not losing them.  There is always something I can do.  But what do I choose? 

We often start and finish the day in what only appears as the same place.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

                                   -- T. S. Eliot 

What takes place between the start and finish may or may not be in our control.  We cannot accurately know the path we are on today.  But what we can decide is how we respond to it.