I recently kept my friend’s children when she and her husband made a last-minute trip to the capital city due to a medical emergency. I enjoyed having a preschool-aged daughter for a few days and adding another high-school-aged son to our family. The only caveat was that Betty’s kids attend local schools while mine are homeschooled, so this required a bit of schedule juggling on my part. I had forgotten what it was like to get up early enough to fix and serve breakfast, pack a nutritious “lunchera,” walk a tiny child several blocks to the neighborhood preschool, then rush home to begin cooking a big lunch early enough in the day so our teenage guest could eat his main meal before heading to class shortly after noon. After serving lunch to Sebastian, I ran back to the preschool to pick up his sister, and then hurried home to serve lunch to everyone else. 

I won’t recount every moment of the days that I kept my friend’s children. The point is that I had forgotten how busy I was during the season of life when our boys were little and they attended the local school. But two days with my preschool guest reminded me of those years when I never had a spare minute in the mornings to read more than a few quick verses in my Bible, and most of my praying was done out loud as I walked the boys to and from school. I may have felt like a fairly competent mother back then, but I was plagued by the nagging feeling that my spiritual life was woefully lacking. 

Looking back now, I realize that it wasn’t God who put the spiritual guilt trip on me. He knows that little ones wake up at the crack of dawn, making early-morning quiet times an impossibility for most moms. He doesn’t listen disapprovingly to hurried prayers as we gather backpacks, lunches, and homework while rushing out the door to school. Instead, God graciously reminds us that there is a time and season for everything, and He encourages us to join King David in saying, “My times are in your hands.”