CLEAN CALENDAR

Lord, I’m beginning this new year
with a clean calendar.
By the end of the year
it will be marked up, messed up,
ending up looking like
a kid’s magazine in a dentist office.

There will be scheduled
and rescheduled meetings and games,
appointments and disappointments,
birthdays and anniversaries.

And then there will be the unscheduled:
hospital visits, wakes, funerals.

Hopefully there will also be surprise,
those joyful interruptions
to our scheduled and structured life:
a friend from long ago
will be in the area and will call.
Surprise! We have an opening
for them in our messy calendar.

And hopefully, too, I'll have time
for You, Lord, on my calendar this year.

© Andrew Costello

Reflections, 2009