MEASURING TIME, BEING MEASURED BY TIME

The Calendar

I glanced at the clock on the wall in my kitchen, and the familiar whoosh of adrenaline flooded into my system. I had to get my three young teen kids to three different destinations at the same time, and we were running late. In other words, it was a typical Tuesday in our suburban household.

"Get a move on, you guys," I called, ratcheting up my voice half an octave so my three young teens would catch my sense of urgency. "We should have been out of here five minutes ago! Rachel, do you have your Spanish folder? Ben, where's your tie?"

Jacob yelled from the basement, "I'll be there in just a minute. I just have to finish —"

"No, not 'just a minute,' Jake," I interrupted him. "Now!"

Rachel stomped into the room. "I can't find my Spanish folder."

"Did you look in that pile of books by the piano?" She stomped out of the room in double time. On cue, Jacob emerged from the basement, no shoes or socks on his feet.

"I think all your socks are in the laundry," I told him. "You'll have to run back downstairs and grab a pair from the dirty pile. Hurry!"

From the living room, Rachel called, "I can't find my folder anywhere!"

At that moment, Jacob emerged from the basement holding an unmatched pair of tube socks as if he were carrying a sack of rabid bats. "This is the only pair I could find."

Ben clipped his tie onto his grocery store uniform shirt as he hustled past me to the car, muttering, "I'm gonna be late for work."

It's been more than a decade and a half since I was chauffeuring my kids around our local suburban solar system. I have plenty of cherished memories of them during those growing-up years, but precious few of those memories were made during the frantic daily chase to lessons, after-school jobs, get-togethers with friends, or youth group activities. Though there are certainly seasons of life that are busier than others, it is true in every stage that abundant activity does not equal abundant life.

Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of Matthew 11:28-30 captures Jesus' winsome invitation to each one of us:

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me — watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly. MATTHEW 1 1:28-30, MSG

A rhythm is by definition a pattern. Many of us get used to living without a pattern, without pauses or punctuation marks:

Our days bleed together onetothenext. Though penciling onto our calendars some breaks in the form of vacations, downtime, and appointments to gather with family and friends will create a little bit of emotional breathing room in our 24/7 lives, we still function as though we're the author of our stories. There's not much space for grace if that's the case.

Most of us in the church have heard plenty of messages about the generous use of our financial resources or the value of serving others with our gifts and talents. The way we use our time is often included in the way we talk about stewardship. Time is a precious, irreplaceable resource, certainly. But when we speak of it only in terms of something at our disposal, we risk missing much grander and more beautiful truths about ourselves and the One who made it for us.

IN THE BEGINNING ...

The first words of Genesis 1 highlight the way in which the eternal God first chose to express himself as Creator. The words "in the beginning" establish a line of demarcation between the eternal One and his finite creation. He anchored time to a fixed point "in the beginning" in order to unfold the rest of his creation. Indeed, the notion of time itself speaks of limits. Time can be measured, a distinct contrast with the limitlessness of God.

Yet God reveals his own use of created time throughout Genesis 1. Each movement of creation ends with a time stamp: "There was evening, and there was morning — the first day ... the second day ... the third day" — all the way through to the description of the creation of Adam on the sixth day. Even on the final day of the creation week, the holy rest had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The way in which time was lived and measured by the ancient Jews was extremely countercultural. Writer Thomas Cahill credits the God of the Jews with changing the way in which ancient peoples measured time. Every other ancient civilization (such as the Sumerians and Egyptians) saw time cycling continually in place, without a larger purpose. "Cyclical religion goes nowhere," he writes, "because, within its comprehension, there is no future as we have come to understand it, only the next revolution of the Wheel." The human race began to talk about time differently when God called Abram to leave Ur by faith and head to an unknown land God would show him. Cahill continues,

Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value. This new value is at first hardly understood; but already in the earliest accounts of Avraham [Abraham] and his family we come upon the carefully composed genealogies of ordinary people, something it would have never occurred to Sumerians [the dominant civilization in the region at the time Abram was living] to write down, because they accorded no importance to individual memories.

Time became a journey, not a wheel. What's more, the journey had an eternal purpose — and a destination.

Within a few generations, Abraham's descendants eventually found their way to safe harbor in Egypt during a time of famine in the Promised Land. Within a few more generations, these honored guests of one pharaoh became slaves of another, who carried no memory of the...