Can Love Be Scheduled?

Would you say that a whiteboard schedule could ever be a tool that would show love?  I heard a great story along these lines several months ago and have been meaning to post about it, and I’ve been thinking about the struggles I have with my own schedule, and about the strategy of scheduling in general, so now seems a good time.

Anyway, we had a dear woman in our church who had been fighting lung cancer for a decade.  She did everything possible to fight it, including participation in the trial of a new drug.  She was written up in a number of medical journals as being a sort of miraculous survivor.  And she remained active and involved, continuing to ski well into her seventies (she died at 80), entertaining, and (my personal favorite) wearing purple nail polish.  Jane was a glowing example of someone who trusted God fully and looked forward to Heaven but kept her grip on her life here on earth for as long as possible.  She may have needed a walker, but she still came to church, smiling and talking and refusing to take herself or her illness too seriously.

But she finally became bedbound, cared for by a hospice nurse, her husband, and her extended family.  Her husband needed back surgery but put it off, saying that he didn’t want to waste any time in the hospital when he could be home with Jane.  He had the surgery a week or two after she died; the way he scheduled it showed his love for her.

Her grandson Gregor is my main example in this post, however.  At the time all this was going on he was a junior in high school, an honors student taking many advanced courses, a marching band member, and an athlete.  His schedule was mind-boggling enough, but when his beloved grandmother entered the last phase of her life he wanted to spend as much time with her as possible.  He lived over 30 miles from his grandparents’ house, so the distance wasn’t trivial.  What did he do? He planned. He scheduled.  His mother told me that he set up a whiteboard in his room and wrote out his homework schedule to figure out how to fit in as many visits to his grandmother as he could.

We often think that acts of love must be spontaneous in order to be genuine, don’t we?  They must arise from the impulse of the moment.  Here’s what I think, though, from my own experience, my reading, and my observation of others:  The emotion of love (however you want to define it) cannot be called up by a sheer act of will, any more than the emotion of happiness can be.  (“I will be happy. I will be happy” is a sure route to feeling pretty unhappy.)  Gregor already loved his grandmother; that’s why he was willing to go to so much effort to spend time with her.  But . . . his actions fostered his love.  If he had said to himself, ‘I just can’t go visit Grandma; my time is too limited,’ that decision not to act would have inevitably lessened his connection to her.  He would have had to somewhat distance himself emotionally since he was distancing himself by his actions.  He might have said, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter anyway.  She won’t even know I’m there.’  But it did matter.  It mattered to him.  Now that Jane is gone, I’m sure that some of his most precious memories of her are from the times he made the effort to trek up to Parker from Colorado Springs.

I have a chapter on the use of time in my book (available here and here), and one point I make there is that if an Israelite was going to keep the Sabbath, a command given by God and a way to show love for God, a certain amount of planning ahead was involved.  Otherwise, your day of rest of was going to be a day of frustration as you looked around at all the things you didn’t get done and now couldn’t do until sundown on Saturday. You wouldn’t be focusing on worshiping and honoring God.  So, as I struggle to use my own time well, and stick to the schedule I’ve set up, I need to ask myself, ‘What’s my motivation?  Am I doing this out of love?  Will I look back on this with happiness?’ Hard questions to dodge, if asked consistently.