What mental pictures or ideas do you have about time?
To measure a year do you sing about 525,600 minutes from “Seasons of Love” in the musical Rent?
Do you associate time and tasks with relationships instead of clocks like “After I visit my friend I will work on this task”?
One basic contrast is between Chronology (arranged in time of occurrence from earliest to latest) and Kairos (the opportune or decisive moment).
Kairos is beautifully affirmed here: “But, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children” (Galatians 4:4-5).
For a long time, I was a month-at-a-glance kind of person. That gave me a helpful orientation to what I was going to be doing.
The Bible uses a monthly time frame in telling the redeeming story of God’s love for us and the world. As our spiritual ancestors were being prepared by God to be liberated from slavery in Egypt in the first Passover “The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, ‘This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.'” (Exodus 12:1-2).
In the last couple of years, I have moved to a two-week view in Google Calendar. This fits better my current mental horizon for work and responsibility.
In March, a seminary classmate and colleague, Rev. Steve Koski posted on Facebook about taking his wife to urgent care for the flu almost three years ago. It turned out that she was airlifted to a hospital where she spent five weeks in ICU on a ventilator. Steve writes,
One day I was wearing my fear on my face when the ICU nurse said, “Steven, you’re going to make yourself sick trying to predict what will happen tomorrow. Here in the ICU, we live in 6-hour installments, sometimes 6 minutes but we never think past 6 hours. Here’s my best wisdom for you: Live in 6-hour installments. Shift your focus from worrying about what might happen tomorrow and bring as much love and heart and soul to these six hours as you can.”
In an interview about his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman observes “I think it’s about acknowledging that we are finite, limited creatures living in a world of constraints and stubborn reality. Once you’re no longer kidding yourself that one day you’re going to become capable of doing everything that’s thrown at you, you get to make better decisions about which things you are going to focus on and which you’re going to neglect.”
Being honest about our time orientations is humbling. Burkeman states, “So I think the reason that we seek distraction is that working on stuff that we care about is often scary. It brings us into contact with all the ways in which we’re limited—our talents might not be up to what we’re trying to do, and we can’t control how things will unfold.”
I have come to see the wisdom that time management is more about managing yourself within time. How does our view of time affect our behavior? What do we do differently because of our orientation to time? The writer of Colossians guides us.
Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone (Colossians 4:5-6).
The wisdom is to adopt the time frame that is needed. Which time frame brings us closest to God and into the most contact with reality? By God’s grace, we can shift our focus from worrying about what might happen tomorrow and bring as much love and heart and soul to the time we have.
Part of the beauty of the Church is how God has given us different views of time. Some of us are long-range thinkers and planners; some of us are minute-by-minute or six-hour people; some of us work by one week or two, and then there are the monthly people. Regardless of our time orientation, God is present with us with redeeming love.
May you experience the fullness of time God gives you and show up with as much love and heart and soul as you can bring.
P.S. I recommend Time Wars by Jeremy Rifkin for a fascinating overview of time orientations.