Of course, my flight to Dallas was delayed by a few hours in Tampa.

There was a mechanical. I remember sitting in the gate area, feeling like I’d been duped. I had rushed to get to the airport, turn in the rental car, and check my odd collection of bags within the two-hour window I had to work with; but, it turned out that the rushing wasn’t necessary.

I broke my personal speeding rules and went against my nature so I could arrive at the airport on time, and my body felt totally ragged and beat up because of this latest surge of stress. But had I started jotting down notes and verses in my phone at the beginning of The Imposition Tour to help me keep my mind right, and when I was sitting idle in the gatehouse that day, I felt the need to write.

There is an entry in the mix of notes that I saved about how silly humans are about time.

We kill it, race it, waste it, and sometimes, we miss it. Time is always measuring the minutes of my life, yet very often, I forget to be in the moment when I have it in my grip. I spend so much time wishing for things to be different; and, I spend too much of my idle time forecasting my ideas into the minutes that I’ve yet to receive.

But for me, the whole Imposition Tour seemed to be governed by an oppressive stopwatch — or maybe a better visual is a giant hourglass. There was always a sense that each event that was happening to us was represented by sand pouring out of one end of my life into the other end. And as soon as I would accept the act of letting go, or embrace the emptiness of my situation, the hourglass would be turned over, and the whole rush of fear-filled moments would start funneling down the tube again. 

But that day, in the airport, I finally saw a tiny element of beauty in that reality, too. No minute in my life thus far has actually lasted longer than any other. And, I was starting to see that every collection of moments that created “my circumstances” offered up a lesson that had a beginning, middle, and end — which only proves there is so much Truth found in this reminder my mom used to whisper to me when I was having a bad day:

“This too shall pass.”

The only really tricky part was that most of the endings at that time in my life led to the beginning of something new that felt more complicated than what I had just experienced… And, I was very weary from all of the lessons.

But all I could do was solider on…