More often than not, most of our personalities generate one unique response from our families and friends. I admire those who catalyze a sweet smile and soft ah!!!. I, on the other hand, prompt the “shake your head and roll your eyes” spontaneous reaction. I admit, most of what I see and interpret is, for me, a sign from God and, for others, a sign of how strangely my eyes and head add, subtract and abstract. Thus, the head shaking and eyes rolling reaction, in truth, fits me to a “T”.
Background having been sketched, journey with me through one such instance. In my pre-pandemic days, my fitbit clocked my life. Its timing calculated if my body was weak, strong, in gear or out of gas. My life was in tick-tock shape if my fitbit read out 10,000 steps before 8 a.m. and 15,000 before striking High Noon. Then came the first morning Covid 19 restrictions were the alarm to which I woke.
Not joking, that morning dawned with the ceasing of my fitbit’s life span. Seriously, even plugging it in for recharge shed not even a tiny bit of spark to its screen. My automatic, and immediate, response was to google its replacement. After finding its exact duplicate, I clicked the order button, closed my laptop and walked away. No sooner had I done this, when I “instinctively” jetted back into my office, opened up my laptop and cancelled the transaction. Let me, honestly and clearly, tell you I had no clue why I did that, except to truthfully say, I knew God held the answer.
That early spring day brought both the end to my predawn fitness center workouts and the birth to my long, long, sunny walks around my backyard lake path. In the months that have passed since that morn, changes crept into, and altered, my life that only now I fathom and understand.
The clock of minutes and hours used to measure if my life was on time and paced to routinely accomplish goals. Fitbit gone, inspirational music began measuring my steps around the lake, as well as my walk in, and through, life. Sets of God’s music began to keep time, so to speak, for my life’s pacing. My broken fitbit had calculated my life stepping forward. My new direction had somehow pivoted to uplifted soaring. In fitbit time of life, I was clocked into the health of physical achievement. Now, I was docked to the wealth of spiritual inspiration and its filling me with hope-filled, living energy.
Finally, just yesterday, God added it all together for me and taught His most convicting fitbit lesson. Not just I, but so very much of mankind, uses a fitbit to direct our lives. So sadly, we look to a clock for the timing of our lives. If we get something accomplished by a certain moment on the clock, then our lives will be on time for all our wants and needs to be fulfilled. Our fitbit watch, in this reality, is where our faith, hope and dreams, wrongly, rest. However, our faith, hope and dreams triumphantly awaken when we take them from the watch around our wrist and put them under God’s WATCH. The one, and only, place for us to rest or rise is in knowing, and believing, that only under God’s watch can we become who and Whose we are created to be. What’s more, the timing of God’s watch is over us, each and every minute we clock on earth.
Without a doubt, the shaking of heads and rolling of eyes for my being and seeing as I do, never unwinds my trust of God’s timing and WATCH over my life. The hands of a clock may help orchestrate my earthly routine; but only the hands of God’s WATCH awaken me, and you, to our Heavenly Father’s timing, protection and purpose for each and every breath that fills the hours leading us to timeless eternity.
“The Lord watches over you – the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all harm – He will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.” Psalm 121: 5-8 (NIV)
Uplifted in a Broken Down World 