WE ALL HAVE TIMES when the winds and waves of sorrow or pain or perplexity threaten to swamp us and send the vessels of our lives to the bottom. When those winds howl, we recognize the threat. It’s no fun to ride out a storm.
But I’m convinced that it is not always the stormy downpour of pain that capsizes lives; often it is something more akin to the “drip, drip, drip” of a leaky faucet. One incessant drip at a time until the ship is about to go down and the crew hardly saw it coming.
Drip. It’s another medical bill.
Drip. Now it’s the car.
Drip. Here come college costs.
Drip. A job in which you can never say, “I’m done.”
Drip. A drip of a boss that seems impossible to please.
Drip. Nagging thoughts about the direction of your life.
Drip. So many “hats” to wear, and the pressure of trying to do a good job at all of them.
Drip. Too many “yes’s” to too many commitments.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
And suddenly, though it really wasn’t sudden at all, the boat is about ready to go down.
Isn’t it the weight of the “drip, drip, drips” that lies at the heart of many “mid-life crises”?
How many of the folks who cut their marriage vows and run into the arms of another do it because they’re really looking for excitement away from the “drips” of their everyday, ordinary lives?
How many people who trade their family’s love and respect for a fling or for “success” and who end up poor and pitiful no matter what their balance sheet says, wreck their lives because they are running away from life’s “drips”?
How many people sitting in waiting rooms paying big bucks to find out that their maladies are stress-related are there really because of life’s accumulated frustrations and anxieties?
What a weight of frustration and worry, anger and bitterness we often allow to rise in our lives—until we’re on the way down and we are absolutely forced to deal with the issues.
I confess. I’m better at setting up the problem than at providing answers.
But I do know that the time finally comes when we need to recognize that there are limits to our time and energy, and that the only way to successfully navigate the seas of this life is to allow the timeless and all-powerful Captain of our souls to set our course.
Even Jesus didn’t cleanse
every leper in
Even Jesus needed quiet time away from the constant “drip, drip, drips” of the needy people around him. He needed time in the presence of the Timeless.
There were limits even to what God’s Son tried to do in a day. But there were no limits to his love.