Matching Truth with Time

Almost every night, the same drama takes place in our home.  Some time after we fall asleep, one of the children wakes us up.  Currently, it’s usually Piper.  A few weeks ago, it was usually one of the twins…it’s not as if they’ve gotten quieter, only that in our exhaustion we seem to tune out their fussing with a finer filter than we did before.

In that moment, as the child is crying and we’re trying to find our bearings, a series of events happens like clockwork.  Broken clockwork.  Kelsey will ask me “What time is it?” and I’ll answer her.  Then she’ll ask me again, and I’ll answer her again.  Rarely are the two answers even remotely close together.  Literally, it goes like this:

Baby cries...

Kelsey: “Mmmm…what time is it?”

Me:  “Uh….3:15.”

Kelsey: “I fed the baby at 4am. What time is it really?”

Me: “Uh…5:00 o’clock.”

Kelsey: “It can’t be 5:00 o’clock yet…”.

Me: “No.  It’s 4:40.”

Here’s the kicker – I’m staring at the clock the entire time. I’m not guessing.  I’m entirely convinced that it’s 3:15, then that it’s 5, then that it’s 4:40.

It’s not unusual for me to never actually produce the right answer even though I’m holding the clock in my hand and staring at it.  It’s become a game – mildly entertaining for Kelsey but ultimately of no use to either of us.  For some reason, between midnight at 5am, my time-telling abilities take a vacation.  I can tell you what’s happening but I can’t tell you when.

That’s the story of my life.

About ten years ago, God began to speak to us in ways we’d never really experienced before.  Fasting. Intense prayer. Dreams.  In one brief season I had six vivid dreams, five of which played out in frightening accuracy over the course of a couple of months.  In that time, we heard things that we felt God was going to do, and in our sincere immaturity, assumed that His showing us these things was tantamount to our marching orders.   We really felt these things were immanent.   We knew the facts but made assumptions about the timing….and when those assumptions proved wrong, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

Ten years down the road, I’m getting a second peek at some of those things, with hints of more to come. It’s odd – what we felt and saw in those days was unbelievably accurate…and the timing that we expected couldn’t have been further off.  God, in His graciousness, has kept us engaged for a decade in anticipation of showing us the fulness of what He whispered into our ears back then.

I can’t tell time to save my life.  Thankfully, I don’t have to.