Lights

"And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years." -Genesis 1:14

These lights that God hung in the sky to mark 'sacred times' speak to me of His beautiful intricate design for one of our most precious gifts - time. Each moment that passes us by happens once, and is gone forever. Time is so valuable... but so often taken for granted.

This verse speaks to me of finding rhythm in our time. It speaks to me of the importance of distinguishing each season, day, and moment from another. There is a time and a season for everything and when we realise that, it is easier to face the hard days. And it becomes more important to celebrate the good ones.

Without rhythm in our time, life becomes a monotonous dull hum. All our days start to feel the same, and we get bored, lazy, and frustrated. When we learn to cherish and mark all our moments, we create rhythm in our time, a song with our lives.

Rhythm

"Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” -Matthew 11:30 (MSG)

One of my goals for 2012 is to "create rhythm, and live in the rhythm".

If you're anything like me, then you're always reminiscing about the past or impatiently waiting for the next big thing to come along. Sameness and routine scares me. But too often I slip into the predictability of "the daily grind" because I am not deliberate enough in separating my moments, one from another.

What creating rhythm means for me is separating the ordinary, everyday moments into distinct notes that combined together, form a beautiful melody, instead of an indistinguishable blur of monotonous background noise. That is what I hope to do for the year ahead.

During the last week of 2011, I took some time to jot down a few words in my journal related to the kind of rhythm I want to create in my daily, weekly, and monthly routines. I'm sharing them here in case you might be inspired to do something similar.

Daily rhythm:
mornings - peaceful, anticipating, refreshed, calm, stretch, read the Bible, shower, eat breakfast at home
afternoons - don't eat at desk, low-carb, focus, energized, walk
evenings - relax, reflect, recharge, rest, family, friends, no email

Weekly rhythm:
workdays - less Facebook, sleep earlier
weekends - family, creativity, physical activity, outdoors, cook, bake, play

Monthly rhythm:
celebrate one thing (be thankful)
cultivate / get rid of one habit (practice discipline)
tell one person's story (write)
ask for one thing (pray)

Physical rhythm:
Divide a wall in my room into sections and paste up...
'Celebrate' - what I'm thankful for
'Ask' - what I'm praying for
'Others' - how people have inspired me or made me think

"We need rhythm in our time—it’s what makes one moment different from another. It gives shape and color and form to all of life.

The first Christians understood this—that time, like sound, is best when broken up, divided and arranged into patterns and rhythms. And so they created the church calendar. A way to organize the year, a way to bring variance to our days, a way to find a song in the passing of time.

What the church calendar does is create space for Jesus to meet us in the full range of human experience, for God to speak to us across the spectrum, in the good and the bad, in the joy and in the tears." -Rob Bell, Why Advent

Image: Some rights reserved by Brandon Giesbrecht