TIME. Yes, time ; not the properties, the incomes of a certain kind or another, not even feelings. Yes, all these matter. Money matter, love is essential, a house where to live, our life, the health of our dear ones, but aren`t all these placed in the shelves of time, aren`t they put in the pots of the hours, days, weeks and years? How did we keep the oil if we hadn`t any pots? It would be wasted and would flow on the streets!
All the rest we can produce and at feelings we can return. Money come or are lacking, love is on its peaks or in shadows, but life in itself doesn`t go with all these, but goes away with the time…
Everything happens in time and the only one which doesn`t come back from its flow is time.
I am writing these lines on the birthday of my eldest son. He is at his house now. We wished each other well, we laughed on the phone, I wished them happy holidays but when I hung up the phone I felt a deep regret after the time I wasted from his life, the most precious gift I could have offered him every hour, every day, as long as he was in our house.
We had worse times and now we have better times, we had worse memories which are now erased and now we`re building nice memories but I deprived him of the most precious dowry I could have given him and which I gave to career, to others, to the Church, to projects, works, missions…
He was coming in the evening and took tight my hand: `come dad to show you what I drew` or `come dad to show you what a lego I made.`
I answered: `I come immediately, son, only let me write a line more, a paragraph for my work` or I told him `immediately in a few hours when I return from the Church, from the committee, from the conference for youth etc.
This is how three years went by. Then I came to my senses but he was already an adult with other friends, with another entourage, with other priorities.
I wasted the most precious resource we had: TIME, even life with him and beside him. What else would have linked us tighter?
Many times I am asked by other people what they could better do for their offsprings: give them LIFE if you gave them birth, give them TIME. As much time as possible!
We give birth to children to throw them immediately from the nursery, kindergarten, school, college in the arms of other people. We push them in the yards of institutions, under the eyes of other people, before the mouths of others, on the hands of others. We are so eager to wean them to get rid of them and get busy with those things which will offer them a status, a future, safety. In fact we compromise their identity, hopes and emotional stability.
Who is that one of us who spends at least an entire hour with his children, to comfort them emotionally if we can`t detoxify them of everything they accumulated during the day in the craziness of a class with 25 hysterical children? Do we also take into account the bullying they endure tacitly?
If we imagine that one of our children gets sick, we say: `I would give him my heart, kidney, lungs, my life, I would rather die for him only to see him/her living!`
Give them life, why not? Life consists of seconds, minutes, days and years. Give them the time spent with them.
They don`t need your concrete cast after the sweat caused by our going to work in Europe, they don`t need the cars you bring in your garages. They will cast their own concrete according to their own tastes and they will buy the cars they want at the right time. They need you, not your things. They need your presence, not your properties. Let them lack certain things but have rich memories.
If there were the time`s machine if I could go back to the childhood and teenage time of our first born children, both married now, I would change only one thing: I would give them time, with the risk of abandoning certain projects to fulfill, with the price of a professional failure, in exchange for less spiritual works accomplished.
The stake is too important and the exchange I made it`s not worth it. The souls to be pastured from our own house are much more precious than any other souls crying after salvation here or there.
Now having Noah I postponed other important activities and meetings only to stay together and I ended my evening earlier to waste my time telling his good night story to my seven years old child. He hugged me hard with his thin arms and clung to me.
`Dad, how nice is with you…leave your beard longer, when it is short it prickles on my forehead.`
Then he started to breathe slower and sighed in the middle of a dream.
It worths it!
Marius Cruceru, for Edictum Dei.
