WEEK 12 - Time Is Always Relative
I’ve been thinking a lot about time, not only as a mediator, but how it relates to everything else. To have time to do something is a miracle, and to not have time to do something is a solemn occurrence. We are born with an expiration date for this life, and the time we have varies from person to person.
A couple weeks ago, one of our friends died. His ex-wife called us and said he had died on a Wednesday and no one had found out until Saturday. We don’t know how it happened, we don’t know why, and we didn’t know what we could do because immediately after she hung up. We had never met with Julio. We had a budding relationship over the phone and had been trying to set up a lesson with him in person because he had referred himself to the missionaries. Yet, we never met with him. A couple days before this happened, I put into our schedule that we would meet him at a restaurant and get to know him–because we never had time. That was on Wednesday. The Wednesday he would have died if our timelines are correct. We didn’t have the time.
We have been helping this woman from Venezuela recently. She’s older, her name is Heidi, and she’s the one that I mentioned was trying to seduce me last week. Every Saturday we go over to her house to do yard work, and we must tell her we have to go thirty minutes to an hour before we actually do because she doesn’t have a concept of time. She comes up with task after task once we’ve completed one; I doubt she would stop us because time affects her differently. This last Saturday we were there, a couple of days ago, and she was the one that told us to leave. Simply because she had a night out with her friend she needed to leave for. It was only 11 am. Time affects her differently.
One of our friends, Samantha, has a baby named Guadalupe. Guadalupe is the sweetest. She’s probably somewhere between a year and two years and has no concept of time. Whenever we teach Samantha, I’m able to distract her for thirty seconds only to begin crying until her mom gives her a phone. Then, probably five minutes later, she’s interested in being distracted by me again.
We don’t have a lot of time to spend with our lives on Earth. We all begin the same, as Guadalupe, where time affects us all the same, but by the time we’re going out as friends with Heidi, it is no longer the same. I don’t quite know what all three of these observations mean and I’m not quite sure why I’ve been obsessed with these anecdotes this past week, but I guess it’s just to emphasize the importance of every single day. On the mission, no day is wasted in the service of God, but that doesn’t mean we have time for everything we plan throughout that day.
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