I got the call during Easter week.  It came earlier than I expected.  But as soon as I heard the pain in my wife’s voice, I knew, the time had come for our son Caleb to be born.  Yet, I must admit, the birth took longer than I thought it would.  Now I did not think I’d have to pull over on the side of the road to deliver our baby myself, like in the movies.  But, my wife had already been through twenty plus hours of false labor that had brought us to the hospital the night before.  And so with the real thing, I figured things would move along more quickly.  They did not.  Everything seemed to be in slow motion.  And then, nearly twenty hours later, Caleb took his first breath.  In that instant, time both stood still and accelerated into a blurring, bullet-train of experiences. I’ve been living in that state of being ever since.

It’s been an exhausting and exhilarating ride at the same time.  Each day I get to know Caleb better; each day my gratitude to God for Caleb deepens; and each day my heart surrenders to God.There's an important cycle here between relationship, gratitude, and surrender, each moving into the other two, that Caleb has begun to help me clarify.

Children are a gift from God, as the psalmist declares, but I had no idea how the 3 a.m. diaper changes could deepen my love and gratitude for God and for God's gift. I mean sleep depravation is tough and all, but going through messy times together has its relationally bonding effects if you’re open to them. It really makes you re-evaluate your priorities, which I've been doing a lot of lately. Countless times the question: 'How will I spend my time?' has come to me, and then a better question grabs me: 'How will I use the time I’ve been given?'

After all, time is also a gift of God and so needs to be understood as such with all that implies. Our culture would of course disagree saying time is money, or time is what you make it, or something tritely boring like that. It’s all an effort to prop up its reductionistic illusion that through our efforts we can control time for self-centered benefit. Think about the gadgets we use every day. High-tech or low-tech, it doesn’t really matter. Much of our culturally driven focus is toward the organization, management, and control of time. It makes us feel powerful and important to be busy. We may even gain a kind of meaning in the things we accomplish. But inevitably, such control of time leads only to our being controlled by time. We end up driven, drained, and frankly, bored with life. We are left burnt out and wondering if there isn’t more to life than this.

And I’m learning that there is! But it means my surrender. By surrender I don’t mean retreat or disengagement. By surrender I mean living my life-time within the grasp of Christ who himself lives with surrendered hands to God. Within his grasp, I am still engaged and advancing with purpose; it’s just not my own purpose, at least at first. Learning to live open-handedly rather than tight-fistedly has only come when I have had hands that are surrendered to Christ's grasp of my life. The other amazing thing is that the more surrendered I am with my life-time, the more grateful I become in the relationships God gifts me with, and the more open I am to embrace and grow from the deepening layers within each gift. That's when time both stands still with potent meaning and accelerates with a richness of experiences.

The surrendered life is an exhausting and exhilarating ride at the same time. Jesus calls all of his disciples to resist the tight-fistedness of the world and to live their life-time in the generosity of surrendered hands instead. How are you doing? Are you possessive of your time? Is time driving you? Within the surrendered hands of Jesus, God has a gift for you. Will you surrender to him, opening your hands and your life-time to embrace what he has for you?

In Jesus' Grasp,

Mark