This week, and every week before it over the past months, have shared a singular type of moment. They have, of course, shared a plethora of moments—the moment I realize I must get out of bed in order to get to work on time, the moment I notice I am late for 11AM prayer, and the moment at 4:30 when I finally find my sleeping cat after walking throughout the house searching for her after work—and these moments constitute the very rhythms of my week, thereby making up my life. And so does this one—it is the second-to-last moment I always notice as the week comes to a close.
It is Sunday, and it is around 4PM. It is the moment that finds me when I am lying on the couch, or writing a short story, or (last week) lying in bed to avoid the debilitating depression of the second day of my period, and I realize that in one hour, I must drag myself away from my short day of rest and back to church, where Caleb and I serve, weekly, as youth leaders.
From this moment to when we arrive at youth group, I grump. And I have no tangible reason to: my upperclassmen girls are wild and lovely, my co-leaders are across-the-board my favorite people at church, and the whole event only lasts two and a half hours. But I frown and sigh all the way to the car, down the highway, and into the parking lot.
This moment is the current shame of my spiritual life. It is a constant rhythm that I cannot get away from, and therefore says something remarkably and embarrassingly true about my heart.
I have found this: I have a condition in which I believe that every moment of my life is my own. I will happily share, but only on my own terms, and certainly not on a weekly basis. And so much of my life already feels not my own—I must work forty hours a week, I must clean my house, I must sit in traffic—that those precious hours on Sunday feel as if I must cling to them with both hands, squeezing in whatever rest and relaxation will fit, until they are stolen away from me again by the needs of the others around me.
But when I cling to those hours, I have found that my hands can do nothing else. So I sit in the need to make those hours worthwhile, pressuring them to be the most lovely hours of my week, and rendering them utterly useless. In fact most weeks, those hours before The MomentTM are the least productive and boring hours of my week. I nearly always regret how I used them.
I think this is what makes me so grumpy. As soon as I have a moment to do whatever I want, I have wasted it. I act so selfishly that I do not act at all, and then I disappoint myself completely for having not acted.
But my favorite part about this cycle is this: The MomentTM is not the last moment that I truly notice in my week. It is—as I noted above—the second-to-last.
The last moment I truly notice in my week is the one that happens after youth group. Caleb and I sit in the car, exhausted, on the way home. I have probably cried with a dear teenage sister, and Caleb has probably fought for the attention of a number of underclassmen boys, and we both have not thought a selfish thought in two and a half hours. And both of us smile on the way home.
Amy Carmichael wrote this: “Do not retreat from the needs of others, but rather, run to them. The best way out of your own head is using your hands to serve. The soap used to wash dirty feet will not only leave the hands clean, but also the heart.”
This, I have found to be true. In the most selfish of moments, when I believe my life and my moments are my own, God continues to meet me in the faces of Gabby, Naomi, Zara, Jade, Emma, Mary, and so many other young people, and He asks me if I will offer my dirty hands to serve. And, in His wonderful kindness, serving them is transforming my heart just as much as I hope it is transforming theirs.
Every Sunday, I forget the privilege that it is to love them, and every Sunday He reminds me as soon as I walk in the door. And my hands come away clean, as does my heart.
