Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Philippians 2:5-7, Luke 3:23, Exodus 2:21-25, Exodus 3:1-10, Revelation 3:15-16

Howard Drummond reflects on the importance of not rushing life.

Howard Drummond

When I was a single young man, I lacked one fundamentally important ingredient for survival. I didn't know how to cook.

I spent most of my life before I got married hanging out with other families that were nice enough to take me in for a meal. I won't mention that some of my meals consisted of packet mash potatoes and tinned curry, (yum, yum)!

Every Sunday after church, or during the holidays, some kind family would let me go for dinner and I would blend into the fabric of their domestic narrative and get to the all-important meal.

The only problem with those brief highlights of my single life is - you guessed it - all the other days of the year I spent trying to figure out how to cook for myself. That was until I discovered the microwave. The microwave allowed every bachelor to run to the convenience store, to the frozen food section, run back home and heat up a delicious meal on a budget. What was so wonderful about the microwave is that you could have this meal in minutes!

As simple and satisfying as that process appeared though, there was always a dilemma: how do you make the middle of whatever you've bought get as hot as the outer part, without the meal looking like something that was found from the aftermath of a nuclear fallout? So there needed to be a rescue plan. What about going to mom's house or grandmother's house? Southern fried chicken, rice and peas, salad with those beef tomatoes and slices of cucumber, huge mutant lettuce leaves, coleslaw and those all-important fried dumplings seemed like the ideal plan. And it was executed with perfection with the addition of hot pepper sauce and a bottle of Shloer.

So Sundays after church, I'd go home to a wonderful, delicious Sunday dinner that filled the whole house with the smell of food cooked from her soul. The one thing that stood out most about that Sunday meal is that she didn't wait until Sunday morning to start cooking, you see, my mother and even my grandmother started cooking Sunday dinner on Saturday. She'd let it simmer all night long. She'd let the juices marinate and let the meat, whether it be chicken, lamb or even fish swim in the sauce late in the midnight hour. So on Sunday afternoon from 12.30pm onwards I would reap the benefits of work that started on Saturday.

The difference between my microwavable meal and my mom's cooking was simple: time.

Like microwavable meals, there are microwavable lives. Hot on the outside, but cold in the middle. Today, everybody wants their gifts, talents and even their blessings in a hurry, in an instant, how they want it and when they want it.

They want it with no process, no leadership and even no accountability. We believe our own hype of how good we are; that we're better than the guy who got promoted first or drafted in last, or even the person whose currently called to be in charge. We assume our gifts are ready to take us where our character may not be strong enough yet to keep us.

"Give it to me now", we might say. But guess where character is created? In the marinating.

Nobody wants to go through the process of the old fashioned word called 'work'. We come out of the womb being told we're good, but good is the enemy of great. Greatness comes with...time.

Time is not your enemy, time can be your friend if you manage it well instead of it managing you.

What God has for you will not expire like milk. What God has for you won't 'go off' or turn 'sour'. It won't begin to rot or develop mould if we use time as something that enables us to grow.

Time develops a maturity, so when 'the manager' puts you in the game, you have some wisdom to go with the speed. God, our manager, or coach, knows how much marinating we need so we don't play up with whatever gift he's prepared for us.