Last week I wrote about God’s re-question to me, “Am I enslaved to my stuff?” This week I am coming to realize that I’m not. Not enslaved to my stuff, that is, but I am enslaved to something: Time.
This is a very difficult realization for me, but a true one. Time has been a deeply entrenched idol to which I bow every day, and I can feel God tugging at my heart that it’s time to give this one up.
I think it crept into my heart slowly at first, unnoticed, even undetectable until it became an enormous monument representing all my selfishness and seemingly righteous anger. Today my Bible study group reviewed the chapter entitled “The Clock” in David Mathis’ book Habits of Grace. And as I sit here now pondering our discussion, it is so abundantly clear that I have tried to grasp my time by the neck, strangling it to the point where I have dominated it, controlled it, and subdued it according to my every whim—only to find that Time has really been controlling me.
This past Sunday, I came across a quote from Tim Keller that seemed to sum up my problem:
When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains.
My time is “my time.” Everything is, after all, about Me. Ahem. You can frequently find me actually counting the seconds till I can put aside any and all responsibilities so that I can have time to myself. I want to choose how I spend my time, even sometimes at the expense of others. If I want to spend time with someone and don’t get it, I’m upset. If I don’t want to spend time with someone but have to, I’m perturbed. If any certain activity or responsibility takes too long, I’m bothered. Do we see a pattern here?
What I must confess, if not entirely obvious, is that I want to be in charge. I really don’t want even my husband or kids to have a say in how my time is spent. I’ll act like it’s my choice to wait at the bus stop or in school carline because, of course, I get a few minutes to myself while I wait. Yes, I’ll put the kids to bed each night, so long as they’re down by 8:00 p.m. so that the rest of the evening is mine. And if Alex isn’t ready to spend time with me when I’m ready for him, it isn’t a pretty picture.
But my idolatry of time goes outside of our family too. I schedule plans and activities on a limited basis. And I tend to be very protective of the time I have left. Unfortunately, I realize that I’m not very flexible with the remnants of my days. While I do use some time serving others when it comes to our ministry in Peru, you might not find me focusing much time on other immediate service opportunities. David Mathis puts it this way:
“Let our people learn to devote themselves to good works,” [Paul] writes, “so as to help cases of urgent need, and not be unfruitful” (Titus 3:14). Fruitfulness (productivity) means meeting others’ needs with “good works”—expenditures of our time, energy, and money in the service of love—which will be both proactive and reactive. Without scheduling, we will falter at the proactive; without flexibility, we’ll be unavailable for the reactive. (214)
Scheduled or not, my “good works” are few and far between. Perhaps I am being a little hard on myself, being a mother of three little children and Vice President of a foreign ministry. But it all comes down to where my heart is and where it needs to be. I need to let God decide how my time should be spent, to be flexible and not enslaved to Time any longer. It’s time for “my time” to become Christ’s time. For where my heart is, there my treasure will be also.
The Art of Choosing True Life 