One young woman was running late for the luncheon. She shared why after she arrived and caught her breath.
She “needed” to stop by for a fountain drink at the gas station. (Since one of my earliest blogs was about my “need” for fountain drinks, I quickly related to her story.) She was already running a bit late, so she quickly jumped into her car, put the drink in the console drink holder, and raced down the road.
It wasn’t long before she glanced down and noticed the double cup holder was brimming with soda. She quickly pulled over, removed the cup, and grabbed a beach towel from her backseat. She tried to soak up as much as she could in a hurry, and was curious as to why the cup was leaking. She hadn’t noticed any leaks when she picked it up except what she attributed to drips from the cup sitting in a pool of soda. But as she looked more closely, she saw a steady leak coming from the bottom of the cup…and discovered an earring stuck into it. She recognized the earring as her sister’s, who she promptly called with a gentle reminder that leaving earrings post up in the drink holder of the car probably wasn’t a good idea. She also pulled into another gas station, carried in both the leaking cup and the drenched towel and asked with her southern charm, “Do ya’ll give replacement cups for problems like this?”
It doesn’t take much to create leaks in our lives. We can get quite a distance down the road and have a mess without even noticing it. We get in such a hurry that we rush in and out of our routines, and we don’t pay attention to the little annoyances that can wreak havoc in our day.
What drains you?
We think we don’t have time to pay attention to all the details. When something happens to create a leak in our day, we can have a big mess before we even realize it. Then our day in which we didn’t think we had time to notice the details suddenly becomes even more urgent. We do what we can to mop up the mess, redo what we’ve done up to that point, and move on, yet time passes, we feel even more urgency, and we’ll have to commit even more time to thorough cleaning later.
Pause.
Take a look around at the details.
Notice.
Take a breath.
Enjoy.
You can’t prevent every small leak. You won’t notice every earring or other tiny object that has the potential to poke a hole and create a leak in your day. But you can slow down. You can choose to live from blessing to blessing instead of living from emergency to emergency.
You can replace being late with being right on time: God’s time. But you’ll need to seek and trust him through the process, giving him attention, trust, and glory through each moment.