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Flying home, Houston to Denver, from a business trip years ago, I was sitting next to a young guy who was having what can only be described as a hissy fit over our flight’s delayed takeoff. He was going to miss his connection for Aspen that night. He fussed, he cussed, he carried on to no end. Finally, I turned to him and said, “My friend, you’ll get to Denver tonight, you’ll stay overnight in a hotel, and you’ll be on the first flight to Aspen tomorrow morning. You’ll likely be at the ski slopes by the time they open. It’s really not worth a cardiac over something we can do nothing about.”

It’s back to indifference that I wrote about at length. Can we be indifferent to things that impact our schedule over which we have no control?

On a mission trip to India in 2014, I watched in amazement as our host, a pastor who had a lot on his plate that week from taking care of our mission team to planning and executing a major multi-church, multi-national gathering. 30-mile road trips sometimes took more than three hours. Yet he never flapped. My takeaway was, “Things take as long as they take.” 

Sometimes when I’m running an errand, for example, I want things to take less time than they take! There’s that internal tension, purely self-induced. I need a good dose of “things take as long as they take.” A holy indifference to time.

Jesus had that perspective. Many of his recorded encounters were unplanned, while he was on his way. The end of Luke 18, into Luke 19, he’s on his way to Jerusalem—a very important trip! But he stopped twice, once for the blind man and then for Zacchaeus.

And taking the twelve, he said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.”…
As he drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. And hearing a crowd going by, he inquired what this meant. They told him, “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.” And he cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”… And Jesus stopped…
And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” (Selected verses from Luke 18.31 – 19.10)