Time
By Enid Ning
“Enid!”
The pleasant world of Anne of Green Gables evaporated as the outrage in my mother’s voice jolted me back to reality. I clutched my book tensely. What had I done now?
“Enid!”
I hurried to find her, hoping that a quick appearance would somehow defuse her anger. My mother was standing in the laundry room by the open washing machine, hands on hips, glaring wrathfully at me.
“Just look at these sheets! They’ve been here for three days, and they smell terrible! You’re going to have to wash them all over again, and this time,” – injection of sarcasm – “try to remember to put them in the dryer!”
Keeping track of time has never been easy for me. As a child I was easily distracted and forgetful, to the continual frustration of my poor mother. A mother of five, a medical doctor, and an elder at our church, she was already overloaded with life’s burdens. She finally resorted to yelling and threatening in an ongoing attempt to help me become more orderly. A sensitive child, I reacted by becoming tense and anxious about time.
My mother passed away from breast cancer when I was only 17. Despite her absence, I continued to live as if she were still there, critical and disapproving, so I thought, of my every move. I became compulsive about time, sometimes spending hours devising schedules. Eventually I developed a small personal timetable divided into 15 minute increments through which I packed my life with appointment after appointment.
The summer I turned 28, I was asked to lead a six-week basic leadership training (BLT) club for teenagers at my church. I planned the curriculum together with advisors from the church, then put it into action. Every morning I awoke to the sound of my alarm clock, got up, dressed, put my trusty little daytimer in my pocket, downed a quick breakfast, and headed downtown to the church via a car ride with my father to the subway.
One morning, God drew my attention to the alarm clock in my bedroom. I want you to throw it away, I distinctly understood Him to be saying. And your daytimer. Throw it away, too.
I was dubious, but had experienced too much of God’s faithfulness by then to disobey. “Okay, Lord.” I tossed them quickly into the garbage. “I hope you know what you’re doing. I have a lot of appointments set up, and you know I have to be downtown every morning by eight-thirty.”
I’ll take care of everything, came the clear impression.
“Okay, Lord.”
And, somehow, I did get to all those appointments. I discovered that if I went to bed by ten each night, I automatically awoke at six the next morning. I continued waking up on time everyday without the alarm clock, and made it to work downtown without a hitch. It did seem as if God was taking care of everything. But the most incredible proof of God’s faithfulness to me came at the end of the summer.
“Dad, what are these little spots on my skin?” I was standing in the kitchen of my father’s home on a Saturday afternoon. The final week of the BLT Club was coming up, and I had discovered a small rash on my arm.
My father, now a widower, a medical doctor and an elder at our church, interrupted his telephone conversation with our church secretary to examine my outstretched arm. “Hmm, looks like you have chicken pox, Enid,” he commented unconcernedly. A little perplexed, I processed the information. I had already had chicken pox as a child, so — could I have it now?
Minutes after Dad hung up, the telephone rang again. It was the leader of the youth fellowship where I was engaged to speak this coming Friday.
“Hi, Enid! I heard you have chicken pox.”
“News travels fast!”
“How about if we change your speaking engagement from this Friday to next Friday?”
“Sure, Henry. That’s fine with me.”
I hung up the telephone.
“Oh, Enid, I forgot to tell you!” said my father. “Auntie E called to tell you that there’s a wedding practice this Friday.” My irrepressible Aunt Elaine, or “Auntie E,” as we affectionately called her, had asked me to read the scripture for her wedding.
“Oh! Well, since I’m not speaking at the youth fellowship this Friday, I guess I can go, can’t I?”
“Well, if you do have chicken pox, it’s a very mild case, so you may go. The practice is at a church downtown at 6:00 p.m. I think the church is somewhere near the intersection of Eglinton and Mount Pleasant.”
“Okay.”
All week long I meant to find out exactly where the wedding practice was, but it kept slipping my mind. I guess I felt an inexplicable peace about the practice that kept me from asking anyone for help.
That Friday, when I jumped in the car with my brother-in-law, Rich, to go downtown, I had no idea how to get to the wedding practice after work. Yet for some reason, I didn’t feel too concerned. Rich was going to drive me downtown along with the beautiful cake he had baked and decorated to help celebrate the ending of the BLT Club.
Before he started the car, Rich unexpectedly began to explain to me in detail how to get to the church where the practice was. “Take the subway to Davisville station, then take the Bayview 11 bus which heads east to Mount Pleasant. Get off when you reach Millwood, and walk two or three blocks straight east. You’ll see the church on the north side.”
“Thanks, Rich!” I smiled. And thank you, Lord! I smiled inwardly.
After work, I jumped on the subway, got off at Davisville station, and took the Bayview 11 bus east, just as Rich had told me. The bus deposited me at the corner of a small street and Mount Pleasant, and I looked east but I could not see the church. As it was already 6:00, I guessed I was going to be late. Suddenly, I heard the beep of a horn. A small van filled with people had stopped across the street.
“Enid! Enid!”
Unbelieving, I ran to the van. In it were smiling and laughing friends and relatives of my Aunt Elaine.
“Are you going to the wedding practice, Enid?”
“Yes!”
“Hop in, we’ll give you a lift!”
Again incredulous, I hopped into the van, found an empty seat, and sat down as the van drove two blocks and pulled up in front of the church.
The practice finished at 9 p.m. Friendly people I had never met before had talked and joked with me, and I had had a very pleasant time. Afterwards, Auntie E came to me with an eager smile on her face.
“Are you coming to dinner, Enid?” It was customary for the bride and groom to treat the helpers to dinner following a wedding practice.
“Sure, Auntie!” I grinned, thinking it would be at some quaint little restaurant close by, after which I could simply hop on the subway again and go home.
“Okay. Why don’t you ride with my cousin Kathleen – that’s in the same van that picked you up earlier.”
“Okay!”
Seated in the van, absorbed in conversation with Kathleen, I suddenly realized that we had been driving for a long time. A quick glance out the side window told me that we were in Scarborough, about 25 miles northeast of my home city of Mississauga. Wow, I thought, we sure are going far. How am I going to get home? By the time this late night dinner was over, the subway trains would have stopped running.
I glanced quickly out the window a second time, and a small street sign seemed to loom through the side window of the van: “Bellbrook Road.”Bellbrook, Bellbrook, I thought. It sounded awfully familiar.
The van stopped. “We’re here!”
As I jumped out, it came to me that “Bellbrook” was the name of the street that my brother Peter and his wife Mora lived on. Their house must be close by!
At the restaurant, I asked to use the telephone. First I tried to call my father, to ask him what to do, but his line was busy. Then I called my brother Pete.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Pete? This is Een.” I pressed the phone closer and stuck my finger in my ear to screen out the restaurant noise.
“Oh, hi, Een. What’s up?”
“Pete, I’m at a restaurant; I think it’s close to your house, and I don’t have any way to get home!”
“What’s the name of the restaurant?”
I told him the name.
“That’s right around the corner from where we live! We’ll bring you one of our cars, and you can drive it home, and then we’ll come and get it tomorrow when we come over for the family dinner!”
That night I drove my brother’s car home, my heart full of gratitude to God. Through a string of amazing “coincidences,” He had shown me in a remarkable way that “my times are in His hands.”