Make Time For Hashem

 



By NITZAKHON

I live an enormously busy life. Two children in school, a wife working full time plus part time – and thanks to her for that admirable effort – plus my own business in which I’m fortunate to work from home.  (Here’s a joke: When you work for yourself you get to work half days; you choose which 12 hours you want.)

So I wake up before my wife and get her breakfast and lunch ready. I get her medication out, make her tea, and help her get out the door on schedule. I get the kids up, dressed, fed with breakfast, and with lunches made off to the school bus. Then to work. And blogging. When they come home, feed them more, off to sports or other activities, help them with homework, shop, cook, clean up, do laundry, have dinners ready, and get them to bed including prayers.  It’s a lot. Most mornings my brain immediately starts with the enormous list of everything that must get accomplished that day whether for work or home.

And yet… I work to make sure the very first thing I say is Modeh Ani, the prayer devout Jews say when they first wake up – essentially, thanking Hashem for carrying them through the night. In rousting the kids I sing it with them. (It helps wake up the mind.) Going out the door I touch my mezuzah and remind the kids to do the same, saying the Shema with them.  Often I look at my tallit and tefillin bags as I wolf down breakfast after they’re gone, knowing that putting them on for morning prayers, as I should, would take precious time.

But I do it – as I strive to do it every non-Shabbat morning. As a part of my resolution for Yom Kippur, I also work to incorporate prayers at noon and to be more rigorous about prayers at night. (Jews are supposed to pray three times a day.)

“Make time for Hashem, and He will make time for you” is what I tell myself, and my children. He is the source of all I have, the font from which all things in my life spring. If I make time to thank Him for the wonderful things I have in life, and to ask for His support, I have faith He will do so.

It’s a few minutes. Whatever faith you have, and reading this I suspect most are Christian, make the time for Him. Like bread cast upon the waters, it comes back a thousand-fold.

A short closing anecdote about bread on water: Every year I take my kids on a deep-sea fishing trip for a day. We got to the first fishing spot… and even as others caught fish I began to complain that my line had a sign saying “Not this one”! Same for the second spot. Nothing. As we went to the third spot I remembered I had not thrown my traditional piece of bread on the water, so I did. We came home with five fish… four haddock and a mackerel.


NITZAKHON is a Zionist Jewish blogger based in New Hampshire.

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