October 11, 2021

Receiving Time

As you know, I have been writing a book about time. It is filled with reassurances that in the kingdom of God, there’s always enough time. The irony, of course, is that I am struggling to believe this. I have a book deadline breathing down my neck, and if I’m really being honest, the last thing I might believe is that the hours are sufficient. No, they seem to disappear like socks. And just where do they all go?

I’m becoming convinced that life is set to interruptive mode. We plan our weeks—and then they arrive like willful children. They stamp and scream and run headlong for the street. There are all kinds of strategies I’m trying to use meet this deadline (and cajole these unruly weeks). I’m making lists: of what needs to be read, what needs to be written, what needs to be finished daily to stay on top of weekly goals. Throughout the week, I’m tracking my progress. I’m even saying important noes to people I want to help, simply because I can’t. And still, I find myself behind. Still, every day invites me to receive things unplanned, to trust that interruptions are invitations.

 “I know, Lord, that our lives are not our own. We are not able to plan our course,” (Jeremiah 10:23). My Bible reading has me in the book of Jeremiah, and this was an important reminder to me about the nature of time and the nature of our lives. We have less control than we imagine. If we belong to God, and if he presides over all the earth, life must be an exercise of constant, wide-eyed, open-handed trust.

Time isn’t to be managed so much as received.

This seems like an important reminder for me as I write this in the quiet hours of Monday morning. Normally, this newsletter would have been written and edited and scheduled days ago, to arrive in your inboxes at 6am sharp. But I’ve had interruptions to receive. And though it is tempting to say that I am behind, perhaps it’s also true that I’m plodding as faithfully, as humanly as I can in the life I’ve been given.

In his book, Answering God, Eugene Peterson has written, “Hurry is a form of violence practiced on time.” Perhaps what’s true for me, eighteen months into a global pandemic, is that I want to hurry less than I once did. Or, as I recently told a friend, I want to want to.

And maybe that’s what indicates a fertile place in the life of faith: the wanting to want to.

Yours,

Jen