Just some of your time

This morning I got to school to discover that my watch was missing. I knew I had it on when I left the house so it must have fallen off as I was scootering. The latch would sometimes loosen itself, yet you would think you'd feel a weight fall off your wrist if it ever did come completely undone. Not so! Especially if you are going down a particularly bumpy section of road and all you are thinking about is how to save your bum and your spine from suffering too much trauma.

On the way home I drove slowly, eyeing the other side of the road for anything small and shiny. Something in the back of my mind, though, already knew where to look: the narrow, wild, underpaved shortcut that leads to the main road going up the hill on which I live. The head of it is very steep and extremely bumpy. Small silver pieces resembling parts of my watch caught my eye so I pulled over beside the vegetation and took a look. There it was, in a sad state--run over, squashed, bent, shattered... I knew for sure my watch was very much dead.

I slowly gathered the pieces, feeling a certain sadness. I knew what the watch used to be. I just got the battery changed.  I thought of the story of the watchmaker and his son and the words came to me, "All I wanted was just some of your time."

I thought of things that we lose, expectedly or unexpectedly. When they are gone, you miss them. We live a transient life, and soon even the things we think will last forever will change, decay, or disappear. Timepieces. Relationships. People. For example, my ailing grandmother. Or my 15 year "guitar student" who will be moving out of the House of Hope soon. Because she is leaving soon, let me share her story with you:

My guitar student was the first mother I met at the House of Hope. She was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table and offered me a seat while telling me to be careful--being three-legged, the seat was sometimes unstable. I asked her what her name was and tried to remember, but what I remembered most was her withdrawn, unhappy countenance. I wished she would smile about something, anything. I found out later that one of her greatest desires was to learn the guitar. I offered to teach her what I know, and when she heard of it her face immediately brightened. She smiled. I visited her every week to show her some chords, but we were not able to get through much. When her due date approached she lost interest and become focused on getting the baby out and moving back home. As I saw her each week, her spirits rose and I saw her come out of her shell. She talked and laughed with the other girls. She smiled more often.

I know the guitar lessons were not what did it. She accepted Jesus as her Savior during her stay there, and I knew God was working in her heart. I took a peek at her journal reflection once and saw that she had written "Praise the Lord" after writing about how God changed a difficult situation while she was living there. The Words of Life did not fall on deaf ears here.

Last week she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl and will be ready to go home once her parents have finished relocating to a safer area. I never quite anticipated the fact that the mothers residing at the House of Hope would have to leave. I knew they did, I just never thought about it. What would happen to them afterward? What about the friendships built or the memories made? Today I made my guitar student a little verse card and wrote a few simple sentiments on the back in my messy Chinese. What pages of words I would write if I could have penned her language, if I could have gotten to know her more, if we could have had more time...

But time is just slipping away, and we must hold on to every moment that we have.

Our lives are but a moment, but God is Forever.