Killing Time?

Do you ever kill time?

I remember as a student how we counted the days till the end of the school year, marking an X on the calendar as another day passed. Hurray, one day closer to summer vacation!!!

I heard something nice about "counting the Omer". We count the days and weeks from Passover, from the Exodus, until the giving of the Torah on the holiday of Shavuot.

But this count is very different from the count I mentioned in the first paragraph. There we were killing time, just waiting for the school year to end. We were counting backwards: 20 days left, 19 days left, 18 days left, etc. When we count the Omer we count ascending: "Yom Echad LaOmer", "Shnei Yamim LaOmer". We are not killling time. Each day is important, each day we prepare ourselves to receive the Torah. As the counting ascends, we ourselves strive to ascend, to correct within ourselves whatever needs correcting in order to receive the Torah in holiness and purity.