‘What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’

I love those words from the Welsh poet William H. Davies. His poem ‘Leisure’ reminds us of the gift of time, simple things, the beauty of creation, the wisdom that’s just waiting to be seen, yet is so easily masked or taken by the cares and burdens we carry.

For some there is not enough time, the hours race by, for others, there is too much, the hours drag.

We speak of wasting time, marking time, making time, killing time, losing time, when really time is gift.

In the book of Genesis when God has created the world and sees that it is good, God rests and calls that day of rest, that time, ‘holy’.

Time is a precious holy gift. How easily we turn it into an enemy. Instead of delighting in time, letting it shape, nurture and enable us, we try to control it, we fight against it and we are diinished.

And so to another poem, ‘The Summer Day’ by Mary Oliver, who challenges us, “What is it that you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?”

Rev Clare Edwards, Rector of Drybrook, Lydbrook and Ruardean