A friend recently commented that I hadn’t posted on my blog lately and she missed reading it. Of course I replied that I have been so very busy! I don’t have time for that! And I have been busy. Things have been crazy. The busyness of senior year of college was nothing compared to this. But I love nearly everything I am doing..

I love this girl from The Academy with Urban Impact Lexington.

I’m so grateful to be getting to know more people in church. I feel very humbled to get to know people, hear their stories, and learn from such wise and kind people. My job is much different than what I expected, but I am learning so much. I love getting move involved at church and serving in different ways. I enjoy our class time (systematic theology this semester) and the reading for class is fascinating and enjoyable. We are serving with Urban Impact Lexington and the kids are absolutely precious and hilarious (today, talking about heritage and background, an adult asked a kid, “What’s the difference between their heritage?” The kid replied, “Well his hair is flat and hers is curly.” Hair, heritage.. same thing). And most of all, I am loving doing this season of life with 5 wonderful ladies. This would be so much harder without them. Hanging out with them is my favorite part of every week.

So that’s a really short summary of what’s happening in life. Like I said, it’s really busy. And like I told my friend, “I haven’t had time to blog!” We say that about a lot of things in life: “I don’t have time.” What do we really mean when we say that? I think clarification is lacking. Words are important. Words matter.

C.S. Lewis says, “Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” And St. Athanasius (really old wisdom here..) said, “… it is better to put the same thing in several ways than to run the risk of leaving something out.” Be clear about what you mean and craft your sentences to say what you mean. Don’t be misunderstood because of sloppy words.

So I think when we say, “I don’t have time for that,” we really mean, “I am choosing to do other things with my time and therefore I cannot/will not do that.” Think about it. We have time for things that are important to us. If free tickets suddenly opened up to a Matt Wertz concert (or Johnnyswim or Ben Rector or Michael Buble), I would move every plan I had in order to go. If there is a death, we rearrange our lives to go to a funeral. It’s not hard to see. We suddenly have time for things that we really value. We say we don’t have time for one thing and then suddenly we do have time when something we really value comes along. In college I did a fair amount of recruiting for volunteer opportunities. Legitimately college students are busy! I won’t argue that. But when people said, “I can’t, I don’t have time,” I couldn’t help but realize that we all have time for other things. Again, it’s not that “I don’t have time,” it’s that “I don’t have time for that because there is something else that I value doing more, therefore I will turn down option B for option A.” That’s not always a bad thing.. It’s good to say no sometimes. Like Louie Giglio says, “When you say yes to something, there is less of you for something else. Make sure your yes is worth the less.” There are 12,000 things in life that would be good to do. Do we have time for them all? No. So we choose.

What we “have time for” says everything about what is important to us. Because “having time” for something really means that we value it enough to make time for it. Last week I watched 2 hours of NCIS. Did I have time to blog? Yes. In fact I had 2 hours of free time apparently. And I chose to spend that time watching NCIS because I preferred it. We have time for everything in the world. And then we choose how we are going to allocate that time to the few activities we deem worthy of our time.

One thing for which I always want to make time is people. Phone dates, lunch with friends, hanging out and talking, going on adventures, coffee dates, catching up during a walk. Yes, there are limits and boundaries are healthy. But I want people and serving to be a priority in my life that is evident through how I choose to spend my time. I don’t want to “not have time” for people.

So, there are some unsifted thoughts for this Monday night. I hope I have said what I mean in enough ways to make my idea clear.. I hope I would make Athanasius proud, but I won’t be so bold as to assume that 🙂 The irony of this is that I have to get up really early for work tomorrow (waking up in the 5 o’clock A.M. hour as a college athlete prepared me well for this shift of work). I don’t have time for blogging right now! I need to sleep!

Make this week great. Have time for important things.