The Hours That Belong to Someone Else: Living with Lost Time

You look up, and an afternoon has simply gone. The light in the window has swung to the far side of the room; there is a mug in the sink you don’t remember filling, a message on your phone you don’t remember sending, and somewhere between this morning and now, whole hours have slipped past like water through open hands.

The world calls this forgetfulness. It asks, with a small edge of impatience, how a grown woman could lose so much of her own day. I want to answer that question differently, and far more gently, than the world ever has.

This is not carelessness, and it is not a failing in you. Lost time is a door that closed softly, on purpose, so that you would not have to stand inside a room grown too heavy to bear. When a moment asked more of you than one self could carry, the house did the very thing it was so beautifully built to do: it lifted that hour out of your arms and handed it, quietly, to a part who could hold it — and let you walk on, unharmed, into the next. So the missing hours are not truly missing. They are not spilled, or wasted, or gone. They are being kept — held safe in another room by someone inside you who loved you enough to carry them in your place.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? — Psalm 56:8

Every hour you cannot find is counted. Not one of them is lost to the One who keeps the whole house, and knows the name of every room.

Rest Here.