Tidbits for Thought

ONE HOUR

Matthew 26:40-41 “Then He returned to His disciples and found them sleeping. ‘Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?’ He asked Peter.”

One hour! That was all that Jesus asked of His followers. One simple, unadorned hour just to be with Him while He prayed and wept bitter tears. The hurt, the anguish, and the disappointment drip from the above words…. they are enough to make anyone weep. One simple hour, sixty minutes or thirty-six hundred seconds was all He asked.

It is easy to point your finger at the disciples for being negligent and unconcerned, yet how many times have each of us wasted an hour while we could have been basking in the presence of Jesus? How many times have we wasted an hour that could have been spent going deeper into Scripture? How many times would an hour of our time been precious to another suffering soul, yet we were “too busy?” As I look at my own life, the answers to those questions show me, in vivid detail, that I share the same lack of focus as the disciples displayed.

In the sameness of day after day, it is easy to get caught up the minutia and the jot and tittle of daily “stuff” and completely forget how very, very powerful one hour of concentrated effort on a cause or project really is. It is easy to forget that one hour of focused prayer can move mountains or show us a path. It is easy to forget how incredibly wonderful it is spending one hour simply being in the presence of Jesus and feeling your heart beating with His.

The world that we live in seems, hour by hour, to slip further into the abyss of hate, war, bigotry, separation, xenophobia, homophobia, islamophobia and various and sundry other phobias that promote lies and more lies, hate and more hate, separation and more separation. Jesus said that He came that we might have life to the fullest. (John 10:10) A fulfilled life is likely different for each person but I don’t think any stretch of the imagination would tell us that this a world that God wants for us. When I spend an hour with Jesus, it is easy to feel Him shedding a tear for each act of hate or every hungry child or every senseless act of bigotry or every homeless refugee that is being unfairly and brutally persecuted.

Maybe it is time for every living, breathing Christian to spend one hour praying for the Spirit to show us how to help alleviate some pain in the world around us. Maybe it is time to spend one hour seeking opportunities to be of service to someone, somewhere in our orbit; such as spending an hour buying and delivering groceries to a hungry family or spending an hour visiting a lonely person or stepping across the street to get acquainted with someone with a different lifestyle.

We are all capable of some act of love, grace, mercy, or forgiveness that can make an immediate and dramatic difference in another’s life so maybe it is time to…….,. (Fill in the blanks) Think about it!         ~ Aron Smith