In Due Time

Part of a series this week on time and the New Year...

It remains on the edge of the bathtub.

I had been soaking, in words and in water, and she had been splashing about, in laughter and life, when the date due card had slipped out of my library book. It floated and she’d scooped it up.

“It’s all… wet!” The word spewed and I caught it, smiling.

“It’s okay, Shalom. It’ll dry.” I had laid it on the side of the bathtub.

December’s ink pooled. Time bled. Days dissolved, then dried out.

Occasionally, I pick the card up, curled and rippled. Then return it to the tub edge under window light. I can’t read the dates really anymore, but to touch and think: How does time matter? Or is it rather, how time matters.

It runs, bleeds, hurts, then fades indecipherable, blurred.

It’s the Epiphany and I’m having my own on this sixth day of the newborn year, thinking on this:

“While they were there, the time was fulfilled for the baby to be born….” (Luke 2:5-6).

Nativities still sit on mantles and the New Year begins and the world is gearing up for another year. So we march out, determined resolutions clenched in fists. This time will be different. What was, is no longer. Old, grimy time’s passed its due date. We’ve returned one dog-eared year and press open a new year of days. Dare we hope for time to be fulfilled this time? We can hardly imagine: fulfilled time. Everything ever wanted or hoped for or pursued after, fulfilled. The time was fulfilled….

Will this year be?

Or will we tramp into the dirtied puddles of mid-February, weary and discouraged, only to wistfully look back over our shoulder to January when we actually (foolishly?) thought this time, this year, would be different.

Six times, the time’s been fulfilled for each of my children to be born. Not one of them delivered on their expected due date. One a month early, one 3 weeks early, three ten days early, and the last, a half an hour past her due date. With pain and lumbering and false starts, bone-tiredness and soul-heaviness, the time to birth comes in its own time. A body does what a mother cannot will or force it to do.

A mother merely can be faithfully open to the coming, as it comes.

So we live.

We keep the faith: Christ in us will grow. He will divide and multiply and stretch us and we will be full with Christ. The resolution seed planted in January still grows, hidden and determined, come mid-February. While there may be no visible evidence of our new life, new hope as this new year grows old, and yet it swells within, coming, still coming.

These January resolutions become March revolutions, hardly noticeable stirrings of new being within, secreted new life moving, revolving, coming to term.

Slowly you “will be filled with the good things produced in your life by Christ” (Phil. 1:11 NCV).

Day by day, Christ will fill us. Week after week, Christ will produce good things in our life. In Christ’s time, the time shall be fulfilled, perhaps in an unexpected way, an unexpected place, and the new us will be birthed, and the stamp of origin will read: Produced by Christ.

It is simply ours to faithfully let Him come dwell within. It is simply ours to take up bold faith, that the time of our deliverance from old habits will surely come, by His grace.

No, it may not be on our time, and the days and weeks and months of our waiting for our change may blur. We may give up on us. God never does. We may think we'll never be more holy, more healthy, more whole. But can we take faith? The time will be fulfilled and we will be made new.

All in due time, perfect time: His.

Lord, I trust Your ways and let You come: in due time, the time shall be fulfilled. Give me faith, Father: New ways will be fully birthed in this life.



Photo: due date card on my tub's edge