Running Late

Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes
Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats;
He keeps all his customers still in arrears
By lending them minutes and charging them years.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

(Note: I like this saying but Oliver kind of threw me because I didn’t know what a guinea or a groat was so I looked it up.   A groat is worth 4 pennies and after much research and calculations I think a guinea is equal to $20 bucks.   I never said I was the sharpest tool in the shed.)

Have you ever woken up late?  You know the feeling.  You open your bleary eyes or one eye in this instance and glance at the clock and your heart goes into overdrive.  You jump out of bed and think, “What do I do first”.  The odd part about this is that you have a routine that you have followed for years and all of that goes right out the window.

So you are standing there and if you are like me or most women I know, you start asking yourself, “What can I do to shave off a few minutes here and there to save time.”  Can I do without coffee?  Nope.  Can I go without washing my hair?  Then you look in the mirror and the obvious is answered for you immediately.  I can’t go to work looking like a rooster so I can’t cut that out of my routine.  Can I skip feeding the dog?  Not if you have my dog.  He will follow you around and talk to you until you feed him and if you don’t feed him he will go in and wake my husband up by barking real loud.  I can’t skip feeding the dog. 

As you can imagine this is what happened to me this morning.  I felt like I was in a fire drill.  I did cut out several things.  I determined that if I used enough hair spray I could get my hair to lie down, so I skipped the washing of the hair.  I fed the dog and threw some treats at him and I did manage to get out of the house with matching shoes, (I have gone to work with a blue and black shoe before so this is critical). 

I learned two things this morning. Number one is that what I do in the morning to get ready for work is not important and number two is that I waste a lot of time in the morning.  I was able to get up a half hour later and still walk out of the house headed to work at the same time as I do every other day.  Since time is such an expensive commodity in our fast paced hectic world, I think I may just slow down and cut some things out.  So with all this time I am saving, I think I will spend more time with my heavenly Father.  I cannot imagine a better way to spend the extra time I gained by being late.   

Prayer for the Day: Heavenly Father, I come to you often stressed and out of sorts and the reason is because I am wasting time and attention on things that really don’t matter.  Please help me to remember that my most important time is spent with You and the rest is just stuff.  Thank you for opening my eyes every day to the unimportant things that I focus on that could be eliminated that will allow me to spend more time with You.

Scripture: But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.  When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the Lord your God and obey him.  For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your ancestors, which he confirmed to them by oath.  Deuteronomy 4:29-31