Two Hours and Forty-Seven Minutes

Sometimes wonderful things happen in two hours and 47 minutes. I bought a simple office desk yesterday. It looked great on the showroom floor, just what I wanted, deal done. “Do you think I can get it in the back of my CRV,” I asked the salesclerk. “Oh, yes sir. Absolutely. No problem. Just pull your car around to loading dock number 2 and we will help you load it.” What a nice young man.

Loading dock number 2. The big door opened and there stood a man with a long box. Must be for somebody else, I thought. Where’s my desk? When the football-tackle sized man tossed the box into the back of my car, it suddenly occurred to me that I had bought a desk and it was in 2,376,389 parts in a very heavy cardboard box. “Have fun,” the man chuckled as he walked away. When you assemble a complicated item from the long box using 6 pages of instructions, do you ever have to take it apart and do it a second time. Sometimes Part 7 that fits into Part 12 will also fit into Part 3 and when you discover that 7 is supposed to go into 12 and you’ve tightened it down in 3 by mistake, you have to disassemble and start over. Not that I did. I was just curious if that ever happened to you.

But two hours and forty-seven minutes later I had it finished. My wife said, “Nice job. Does it lean to the left just a little?” Yes, sometimes wonderful things happen quickly, sometimes it takes two hours and forty-seven minutes, sometimes longer. My consolation is that it took God several days to put the universes together…several days. And every day I stand in awe of the creative hand that fashioned light and suns and darkness and living creatures and everything else I encounter each day. What other response can there be but deep gratitude for this day and all the ones waiting to be born? I thought God did an especially good job on the clouds I saw this morning. My guess is that it took God only the snap of divine fingers…and there it was.

Nice job!