More From Andrew Billings

It’s been a while since I initially wrote this meditation, but many things in my life have changed since then. One that is most notable is the inevitable passage of time, with one of our sons in college and the other less than two years away from leaving our home as well. My wife, Angela, and I are now contemplating what life as “empty nesters” will be like. We became parents more than 20 years ago, and one of the primary themes of those years has been finding time. How do we find the time to get our children from point A to point B? To reserve time for each other? To socialize with friends? To dedicate purposeful contributions to the church and the community? If one of the common refrains people say to parents is to ask, “How did you do it?” The response was often an exhausted, “I don't know, but we did.”

Now we find ourselves thinking about what to do when things get subtracted from our ledger. There are tons of ways to go with this; eating out, seeing friends, traveling, watching movies, and reading more books seem to top our lists. Still, we find ourselves reverting back to the notion of what it means to live a purposeful life. Absent running to our children’s soccer games or music recitals, how can we take those extra hours and live purposefully?

Increasingly, that answer seems to be to find ways to relay joy and appreciation to others. Sometimes it’s a matter of seconds as I author a quick email message to a colleague telling them I noticed them doing something magnificent. Sometimes it’s a more extended time, such as when my wife prepares a meal for a friend who just experienced the loss of a family member. But most of the time, it’s simply a time to breathe—an extra moment or two to bear witness to beauty in nature, or perhaps to notice from someone’s subtle reaction that we should help them. As my wife and I inevitably watch our sons move into a world beyond us and our home, we want to find a way to make our world larger as well, finding ways to be extra welcoming, extra cognizant, and extra thoughtful.

That’s at least what we aspire to do and be. Being open to new ideas and ways of living seems to be part and parcel of following God’s plan.