get me to the church on time

There is something about Mexico.

I have spent the vast majority of my life surrounded by calendars, Day-Timers, and pocket assistants gently reminding me my time is not my own. Cronos was my master.

Punctuality is not a personality trait that is easily doffed. In the Old Country (as Jennifer Rose so aptly calls our abandoned lands) being tardy was the height of rudeness. Worse, it was seen as stealing the time of others. For an Air Force officer and trial attorney, it was professional suicide.

When I moved to Mexico ten years ago, I brought all of my northern ways with me. I indulged in the same mistake made by centuries of expatriates. I tried to recreate my old homeland in my new one.

I would rise at 7 in the morning to read The Oregonian while listening to the news on NPR (what a leftist friend calls Nazi Peoples' Radio). At 10 I would open a three-week old issue of The Economist (speed is not the byword of the Mexican postal service).

All of that could have occurred in Salem. And it did before I headed south. The only difference was that instead of doing all of that in my hot tub, I did it on the balcony of the beach house while watching the ebb and flow of the ocean -- always aware time was ebbing and flowing along with the tide.

Over the last ten years, I would slough off one routine or another. NPR was the first to go -- and I immediately felt the relief of being freed from the hysteria of the American news cycle.

This morning I realized I had lost another. My sense of time. I have lost track of the days of the week.

Today I slept in -- after staying up until 2:15 in the morning. When I woke up, I started reviewing my Spanish lesson and decided a pot of tea would be a perfect companion for it.

The day was speeding along, but it did not matter. It was Saturday. I have no Saturday appointments. And it was not a Dora day. The day was mine.

Somewhere between Manuel bragging about his new suit and Juanita informing everyone her new dress was pretty, but expensive, I looked at the date on my telephone.

I panicked. It was Sunday, not Saturday. I do have a commitment on each Sunday. Church. And it was beginning in 35 minutes.

I rushed to clean up, and headed off on my three-mile walk to church, arriving in the midst of the prayer of the people. I thought that apt.

Currently church is the only regular appointment on my calendar. And it is the only way I know which day of the week it is. When I attend church, I know it is the last day of the week, and the next morning will start another week. It is my chronological anchor. Without it, each day would slip by unnoticed, one fading into the similarity of the next.

Time is not as important in Mexico as it is up north. Relations trump being enslaved to a watch.

My once-obsessive mania of punctuality has slowly been eroded. If I am 15-minutes late meeting people for dinner, I apologize to the people who waited. They are usually northerners. If I am meeting Mexican friends for dinner,and I show up 15 minutes later than the appointed time, I will be the first person at the restaurant.

I actually would have made it to church today on time had not two of my neighbors stopped me to talk. I could have ignored them and headed off on my appointed rounds. But that is not how things are done in my neighborhood. Relationships trump time.

As it turned out, I learned some interesting things about our neighborhood and I still made it to church. Matters temporal and spiritual were served simultaneously.

Five years ago when we started our cultural awareness classes at the church, Tom led us through a book based on the difference between hot and cold cultures. He had been a missionary in Mexico for decades and had an instinct for teaching the subject.

He gave a great example. In a cold culture (like Oregon or British Columbia) if Steve arrived late for church, people would turn in disgust to see who was disrupting the service. In a hot culture (like Mexico), people would turn and greet the person who was just arriving. Relationships trump time. And it strikes me as being the far more Christian attitude.

I will note that when I slipped into the back of the church this morning, I was obviously entering a cold-culture institution.

It was a good reminder that we have a lot to learn from our neighbors. Instead of getting tied to our clocks, we should spend a little more time tying ourselves to one another.

Relationships trump time.