Water-Seconds

This week I have been sick. The dreaded stomach virus. Usually I am not sick very often, but in the last three months I have been and I really don’t like it.

So, since Sunday I have been on the couch or in the bed eating ice chips. Sometimes they have been my friend and sometimes not.

Yesterday morning I was attempting to rest on the couch in my backroom sanctuary, and I was drifting in and out of sleep. This backroom is attached to the main floor bathroom (which isn’t much more than a closet, but it has served its purpose well). In the next three months the two bathrooms in our house are slated for radical renovations and remodels (I am quite sure that this endeavor will produce a great deal of material for posts). Right now our downstairs bathroom’s shower has a persistent drip that will get fixed, but in the meantime we collect the drip in a bowl and use it for the dogs and for all the plants in the house so it is not wasted.

As I lay on the couch and attempted to sleep the drip was in perfect synchronization with the clock ticking on the wall: one drip = one second. Usually the clock ticking is a comfort to me, but combined with the water it was not. Remember the cartoons when a drip and its volume grew and grew and then Tom would end up beating the faucet until it was twisted, yet when he lay back down it would begin again? I think that’s how I felt for a little while, but just couldn’t quite muster the energy to get up and go somewhere else.

As I lay there I realized each drip was a second falling away. Each drop of water falling was a second in time never to be retrieved.

I lay in my green state and thought about this. The Holy Spirit never wastes a teaching moment and he knows exactly what will speak to me, and he can and does use the oddest of things and elements.

Tamera, what are you going to do with your drops of water? What are you going to do with the water-seconds that are falling away? When they collect in the bowl, what do you intend to do with them? What will you do with the overflow?

I lay on that couch wrapped in my soft red blanket and thought about those questions. All the while the water was dripping filling the bowl. And time is like that, isn’t it? It drips away little by little.

Little by little an hour passes, a day, a month, a year.

Someone very important and special to me looked at me this weekend and through tear-filled eyes said, “I don’t want to look back on my life and regret or feel like it was wasted.”

She has recognized that even the drips and drops are important. She doesn’t want to waste them. Or regret how she used them.

i want her to know that our God wastes nothing. Nothing. Every drop that falls will be used for some purpose if they have been given over to him. Even the ones that seem to just plop in a bowl on the shower floor.

She and I can’t and don’t want to stop the dripping, that’s just simply life. But we can decide how we are going to use the collected drops. We can make willful decisions to use the water in the bowl to bless others. To make them laugh. To lift them. To encourage them. To help them pray. To nourish them.

To give God glory.

To exalt him.

Aren't these the ultimate goals anyway? Regardless of what we do, to give him the glory? To lift him up for all to see?

To be a testimony of what he does with a shower bowl of dripped water when it has been given over to him?







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