Procrastination - It's Making Me Wait

"Procrastination is the grave where opportunity is buried." SMACK. Right in the face. This came from an elderly listener on my favorite radio station, K-LOVE, a nationally-broadcast Christian radio station. God told her this. She stated it over the phone to the morning DJs, and because I tuned in just now, it came to my needy ears. I'm supposed to do something with it. I have trouble with that. It forces me to make a change in my ways. It breaks me out of my box unexpectedly. I have always known I fail in the area of "getting up and going," depending on the circumstance. However, I feel it necessary to pry myself out of the "Put It Off" cul de sac and chug a little harder down the road of "Actually Doing Something". I feel convicted lately, in reaching out to others, in trying with purpose, to make a difference in someone's life. Last night, while attending a project workshop at a nature center at which my 12-year old bunked for a week with a group of 6th graders from her class, I had opportunities to reach out. I wish I had longer arms. Every child in the place has problems. Regular kid problems, but problems nonetheless. There are kids of divorce, kids of neglect, kids of learning disabilities, kids of disinterest, kids of negativity and more and more descriptors, as well as combinations of many. The trouble is, not one of these is invisible or quiet, nor do they all just blend into the atmosphere in a tolerable way. In working with the nine children in our t-shirt-making group, I discovered something: we don't often think about what makes a child or person different and why he acts the way he does, even for one minute. We tend to listen to the tattlers, not the quiet sufferers. We tend to overlook the poor in spirit, considering them weak and silently hoping they'll pick themselves up and get on with it. We justify the meek as shy or disinterested, and don't encourage them enough to share what they have to give. We overlook the givers because we come to expect it of them, being that they don't let anyone get in their way of giving freely and wholeheartedly. We find those who seek justice to resemble crusaders with a cause we don't understand or respect, and have no idea of their motivation because we take more time to judge than we do to appreciate their tireless work toward Right. We scorn the mournful, thinking they have hung on to sadness far too long, not knowing their sorrow, nor their lack of hope. And God blesses each of these because he knows the depths. He knows our shallowness. He blesses us all, and we continually, day after day, take it for granted. We don't take the opportunities to reach out far and wide, in small and large ways. We don't TAKE the opportunities because, at least for those of us in my procrastination corral, feel too harried by the giving of thought to situations and the "what if" of each. When you have the needy ones right in front of you, I dare you to ignore them, to not interact in some way with them, to not notice them. Don't wait. Once the opportunity falls into the hole you've so neatly and painstakingly dug by way of considering the circumstances, weighing the options, and determining your preconceived outcomes, it may not appear again. When you know you've lost an opportunity, you have only regret as a memory. Regrets don't die, and when you try to throw them in a hole, they seem to slither and crawl out again, unannounced and at inopportune times ... reminding us of an opportunity lost to eternity.