The Ticking

 

The Ticking

Our school year is 75+% in the books. Incredible- seems like the first day was last week. Life speeding up and we miss out on good stuff by wasting time. This is from May 20, 2010.
Today was the last regular day of school. Finals are next week, Monday through Thursday, with graduation on Friday evening. What a fast year. I can't even remember the beginning which began only a week after I came back from China on August 3rd. I tell my students that I don't enjoy the start or the conclusion of the school year but I love what's in the middle. We have been reviewing for exams the past several days, correcting the ten tests each final will cover. One thing about my subject matter is I know where it always ends; with the Resurrection. My plan was to finish the reviews and then conclude one of a number of films/movies we use about the Life of Christ. But, in my last three classes, we ran out of time. I needed five more minutes. I wanted to talk more about the application of the crucifixion and the rising of the Savior. I wanted to explain a little more to my eighth graders about the death of Judas and the Ascension and the Parable of the Sheep and Goats but there wasn't time. The bell rang and because we take finals en masse, I will have few of my one hundred thirty students again this year. We just needed five more minutes.

Of course, there was plenty of time. During the approximately one hundred seventy days we met together each period since early last August,  five minutes would have been easy to scrape together. Even I can do the math; it's less than two seconds per day. Two seconds per day are nothing....until you run out of time. It would have been more than simple to carve out five minutes if only I had known. But of course, I knew. We all knew. The last day of classes has been etched in stone since last school year. It's the stewardship of our time that helps make teachers effective. I know there is a young man in one of my classes who is trying to make sense of faith and he could have used the extra three hundred seconds of encouragement. Sometimes we lament that we don't know where the time went but we do. It goes where every other second has escaped since God put eternity in the hearts of all of us. Today, five minutes was an eternity.

Applicable quote of the day:
"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
Albert Einstein

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1