Time is Ticking Away

I've been reading Cindy Lee's book, Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation. It is a fascinating look at how the Church needs to explore spiritual formation practices with a wider lens, realizing that not all groups of people encounter Jesus in the same way.

Very early in her book, she discusses the idea of time. Lee writes, "In the West, our understanding of time revolves around watches, calendars, and planners. On clock time, time only has one direction: forward. If time can only move forward, then we can 'lose' time and become desperate to 'save' time. We treat time like our own possession. We can see this whenever we become irritated and angry when we think someone is wasting our time."

About a decade ago, I was at home and engaged in schoolwork with my youngest son. He was having difficulty staying on task, and I was getting annoyed because the time I'd mapped out for our homeschool day that morning was slipping away. Each minute that ticked away was encroaching on the time I had blocked out in the afternoon for work I needed to get done. I asked him to please stop wasting time and just get his school work done.

He looked at me, crestfallen, because he was doing his best.

All I had seen were the minutes ticking away, but in that moment, what I saw was him. And I realized my calendar had to change. I had to have more margin so I could slow down and be present for this child at whatever pace we needed to move.

I've made considerable strides in this area over the years, AND it is still challenging for me. Just last month, sitting with this same child, who is now an adult, talking about school things, I said, "We just need to get it done," and he said, "I feel like I'm wasting your time." I immediately apologized, set aside my list that needed to get done, and gave him my full attention.

He was right. The message I was communicating was that he was wasting my time. This is never what I want to communicate - not to him, not to anyone. I want to be fully present. Not in a hurry because I've filled my day with too much.

Lee says, "This understanding of time as our possession, however, has always been an illusion. None of us actually owns time, and neither can we control time.… We plan as a way to calm our anxieties and to give us a sense of control over our busy lives. When we try to control time, time ends up controlling us. Our busy schedules take over our lives. This relationship with linear time forms us to be impatient, in a hurry, and constantly productive. This anxiety-ridden relationship with time has carried over into our spiritual lives. We tend to impatiently wait on God's response to us based on our understanding of days, months, and years. We balk at the seemingly slow work of God."

This illusion is hard for me to surrender.

Some of the very gifts God has given me are administrative. I am great at planning a calendar, organizing events, creating timelines, and ensuring things get done.

For a long, long time, I found my identity in doing. Until one day, I realized that I was not created just to get things done, but to enjoy life - to slow down, to be present, to exist in spaces where no doing was required.

Five years ago, when the world shut down, I found myself evaluating the things that were filling my days, and I felt an invitation from God to step away from some of the roles I was holding. They were all good. I loved each one. But saying yes to that invitation, while hard and sad at the time, was transformative.

I didn't know how bound up I was by my carefully crafted schedule. I didn't realize that in being a human doing, I'd forgotten how to be a human being. I didn't know the healing that needed to take place in me that I hadn't had the time or the space to notice.

In contrast to this linear measure of time, Lee writes, "In a cyclical spirituality, our interactions with God are continuous. There's no point where we finish or complete our formation, so there is no hurry to be done. We are not 'projects' to God. God is not in a hurry to be finished with us. Therefore, we assess our formation not by how long it takes but by the fullness of inner transformation."

While I operate at a much, much slower pace of life these days, there are still moments where I find myself rushing, and I am reminded that this is a place of formation that will likely be a work in progress for all of my days. 

How about you? 

~  Melissa