Wanted: Time, three times as much
Time turner. Photo by Natalie Barletta, flickr |
But Hermione was fumbling with the neck of her robes, pulling from beneath them a very long, very fine gold chain.
"Harry, come here!" she said urgently. "Quick!"
Harry moved toward here, completely bewildered. She was holding the chain out. He saw a tiny, sparkling hourglass hanging from it. ...
Hermione turned the hourglass over three times.
The dark ward dissolved. ...
"We've gone back in time," Hermione whispered, lifting the chain off Harry's neck in the darkness. "Three hours back..."
Harry found his own leg and gave it a very hard pinch. It hurt a lot, which seemed to rule out the possibility that he was having a very bizarre dream.
"But --"
"Shh! Listen! Someone's coming! I think -- I think it might be us!"
-- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Prayer #245: Time's After Time
Someone's coming, but I think it isn't me.
My frantic pace sprouted its own legs last week and now runs rampant through my life, divorced from my control. Swept up in it are my once-lustrous ambitions, the flickering beacons I thought were steady enough to eschew temporal limits and lead me to productive glory.
I was wrong.
The constant piling, the quadruple booking, the never-saying-no -- it's lard on a grease fire, a conflagration that threatens to consume what little headway I have made and instead beat me back into a bunker to nurse my wounds with aloe and ice cream.
God of egg timers and morning alarms, hours and seconds, cause and effect -- I won't ask you to slow my man-made 24 hours. Instead, slow me. Slow my feet, my brain, my incessant drive to do do DO.
Doing does not equal accomplishing. Going does not equal arriving. Show me the common sense of these non-equations, and free my spirit to move through time as You intended -- with a gentle swoosh and slide, along no lines.
Amen.