time is of the essence (1)
January 21, 2009
This post is written by my good friend Steven Hamilton, our first guest blogger. I met Steven several years ago when we (Vineyard Central) hosted a gathering called Mayhem — yeah, we were enthralled with Fight Club — at which Brian McLaren spoke. But I really got to know Steven over the course of the first 6 months of 2008. He was one of 21 participants in our School of Spiritual Direction.
There are so many things about him that I came to love. First of all, he’s one of the most active people I know: a husband, father of 3 young children, a full-time government employee in D.C. (The National Archives), and a pastor with the Central Maryland Vineyard. He also happens to be a powerful voice against modern-day slavery, building awareness of the issue, serving on task forces, and working toward the passage of state and national legislation. [You can find him in the video called Love Justice. (Look for the cool guy with the shaved head.)] I wish I had half his energy. Second, he’s got a healthy sense of humor. It’s nice to be with people who know how to laugh. But what I love most is that in spite of his active, demanding life, he’s deeply reflective. Let me amend that. I think that his commitment to living reflectively has led to his rich, active life.
It’s easy to be busy. But it takes hard work, great courage and careful discernment to be busy in the right ways, especially in our day. I think Steven shows us the right was to be “busy.”
You can find him posting regularly at his blogsite Verve and Verse.
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“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven” — so says the wise Qohelet in what we call Ecclesiastes 3.
i’m not sure how the wise one of ecclesiastes was raised, but my mother was an efficiency expert for a large corporation, so i was raised in what was possibly the most efficient household on the planet. there were, of course, very good and bad things about this, but one of the best is that time management was ingrained in me to the extent that it became second-nature … i didn’t just think about efficiency; i lived efficiently.
as i reflect on this second skin of mine, i realize that, in effect, my mother modeled the awareness of time, and i was trained into it. she created a rhythm of life, and i lived in that rhythm. undergirding this rhythm was was her finely-tuned awareness of time. there are hard-and-fast tools to use to better manage the precious time we are given in this age, but i would say awareness is the essence of superior time management … ah, but i’m getting a little ahead of myself.
… let’s start with the rhythm of life:
in the book Timeshifting, stephan rechtschaffen insightfully shares what he calls the process of entrainment: we have a tendency to align our personal rhythms with those of our environment.
“… [We are] embedded in a world and a culture with fast-talking, fast-driving, fast-fooding people and advertisements that drive us — shaping our lives for us — and we are susceptible to get caught up in it in an undiscerning way.”
it’s easy to lose touch with the simple awareness of time and plunge into the frenzied charge of lemmings rushing for the cliff-edge and tragedy. i’ve found myself doing this on almost a daily basis in commuting to work in the washington, dc area. i get on the highway, and fairly soon i’m zoning out and going the ‘speed-of-traffic’, which in my area of the world, is much more than the posted speed limit. in fact, just the other day, i found myself going 85 mph without trying or thinking about it.
so we surge and then crash, surge and crash in a repetitive, destructive cycle of living that conforms to the powerful tides around us. we are quite literally trained toward them. So our “entrainment tendency” creates a vicious slave-master relationship that limits our perspective to such an extent that we no longer believe we actually have time to stop, discern, reflect and consider whether our lives are mistrained
as i mentioned before, my mother was a corporate efficiency expert and she brought her job home with her. what her job typically entailed was shadowing people and then suggesting ways for them to be more efficient, either time-saving steps, re-ordering processes, or altogether new structures and rhythms of work. because of her influence i became — and this is amusing to me now — the most efficient room-cleaner on my street. i would clean my room, then go to a friend’s home to ask them to play, and if they had to clean their room before they could come out and play, i would jump in, organize the activity and presto-chango, lickety-split, the job was done and we were out and free.
yet, while my mother gave me an awareness of time and the gift of efficiency, i also see clearly that she sometimes went too far and sacrificed quality on the altar of efficiency.
and this now brings me to pot pie.
i love pot pie, and there are certain elements of pot pie that can be sacrificed to save time without losing ‘pot-pie-ness’, yet others are non-negotiable and require you to take your time. they require you to be “inefficient.” for instance the flaky crust and the cream sauce are non-negotiable. and while you can get frozen chicken and frozen vegetables to make the cooking process more efficient, you all but kill a pot pie if you use them. the last time my mother made pot pie for me, she sacrificed — for the sake of efficiency — all the stuff that makes pot pie, well … pot pie. Instead we got some two-bit knock-off that barely gets by under the name of ‘pot-pie casserole.’
it was awful.
reflection begets awareness. awareness begets discernment. and discernment is crucial to preserving the essence of something good. it keeps us from sacrificing quality on the altar of efficiency.
but is it possible to turn the values of our culture around to our advantage? eugene peterson seems to think so (and i agree!). in his book The Contemplative Pastor, peterson makes the point that the organizational calendar for keeping appointments has become sacrosanct in our culture. if you say you have a ‘previously scheduled appointment’, no one questions it. they won’t even think of treading over that holy ground and asking, “who are you meeting and why?” so peterson cleverly advises us to use the planning calendar as a tool for becoming unbusy, for pulling out of the fast lane and scheduling time for reflection and contemplation. you break out of time so you can come back into time correctly.
Jesus had a different understanding of time. it was grounded in how he understood his work and what he thought about life. his perspective on time was often at odds with the understanding of those around him. their urgencies were almost never his. he clashed with prevailing notions then and clashes now with 21st century American notions of time. a clear example of this occurs in the the gospel of john, where it says Jesus lingered where he was and delayed for a while before going to help the deathly ill Lazarus, “the one that He loved”. All his disciples thought he should have acted with a greater sense of urgency.
Jesus invites us into a fuller awareness of time, one that allows God to be expressed in us and us to be expressed fully in this world. To acquire it will take the discipline of “unbusying” ourselves so that we have time to reflect. a sustainable faith embraces and creates space and time for what matters most: distinguishing the ‘important’ from the merely ‘urgent’. given this …
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how can we begin to steward our lives and “redeem the time”?
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how can we mature and raise our awareness of something that to us is quite like water to fish?
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how can we become wise with the time given us without sacrificing quality on the altar of efficiency?
I hope you reflect on these questions and join me for a concluding post on the essence of time. your comments are welcome!