Yesterday, I was thinking about the adage “catching up on my sleep”. This crossed my mind mainly because we have an 11 month old who is teething like crazy, and these teeth are giving her the blues. Her gums are swollen and her nose is running, which makes it hard for her to breathe, because her nostrils seems to be perpetually filled with mucus. 

Pardon the visual. 

She kept us up for a good deal of the night on Sunday into Monday, so work was a bit tough for me, and all that I could think about was “catching up on some sleep.” I wanted to go to bed early enough to get to bed and catch up on sleep thad had been robbed from me. And this line of thinking got me to thinking. 

I know that we can’t ever make up sleep. Time doesn’t work like that. But as I continued thinking, I started humming the old song “Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce, and I wondered what I would do if I could hold time in a bottle. 

Would I keep my kids young? Not really. Growing up is an important part of life, and I would not want to withhold that from them for my selfish reasons of keeping them small and moldable. 

Which sent me further down the time alternating loop. 

Would I redo things to cover for mistakes that I made? As much as I want to say yes, a big part of who I am now comes from those mistakes. While many of them have hurt a great deal, and some of them still are hurting in the present, the scars that I have from them inform much of how I think and how I behave now. So, even with the pain, I wouldn’t change anything. 

Would I be further ahead in my relationship with God? Yes. I wasted so much of my early adulthood either away from God, doubting God, or trying to live up to religious standards of who I thought God was, that sometimes I look back at myself from those times as a stranger. I wish that I had gone harder after a relationship with God when I was younger, but then again, a part of me hopes that would have meant that I was farther along is finding out what I’m on this earth to do. There are no guarantees, and God’s timing is perfect. So I might still be wondering and wandering. 

Hmm, so it seems that saving time in a bottle would do me no good. Stopping time, rewinding time…while a nice mental exercise, would profit me nothing. So, I guess my only recourse is to just live my life, right? 

Yeah. And I’m totally fine with that. 

You all be blessed.