I'm told there is a conception of time that redeems it from slavery to the clock. So much of “time-management” motivation teaches us how to wring another minute from the over-wrought day but never tells us why. I learned a casual proverb in High School, something like “you cannot waste time without injuring eternity.”
It seems dangerous to deny that proverb. What is worse than contemplating a wasted life, or wasted opportunity? Regret is so painful we dull it with busy-ness or worn excuses; or we simply bury it somewhere where we hope it will die. But if we had “used” time as we should, there would be no regret. The pain comes because there is no going back. Door closed.
This is where subtlety comes in, I suppose, for few things can mislead like singular ideas in an echo chamber. I've heard all my life of balance. We need various perspectives, a triangulation if you will, to find the path that best corresponds to “the way the truth and the life.”
But balance is folly if the various perspectives themselves are not true. Enter, again, subtlety. Billy Graham was a great and gifted preacher, and no doubt more subtle in his understanding of the Gospel than our friend Malcolm could grasp. And both would readily recognize what I wrestle with today: “Can one really waste time? And if so, is there any saving for it? Any redemption?”
A much older friend of mine once puzzled with me about the problem of wasting water. He said, “How is it really wasted? It goes in the ground, finds a water table, goes through the cycle and returns.” He was partly right, of course. But is it still flatly wrong to pour the leftover water down the drain? Is tossing left-over food in the trash all the worse because someone in a distant land is starving?
We all find manageable answers to this in the mix of life, but this matter of wasting time offers some subtle clues. Time is a gift we find in eternity. Eternity has no time, no beginning or end. A deadline is just that, a time when a given endeavor must stop. But life goes on, unbound. It is bigger than our so-called deadlines, bigger than the ticking monster on the wall.
Deadlines give the nod to time's ubiquitous presence without knowing why. We are carried along by something larger than us, and we define that something with minutes and seconds – the time-keeper that keeps us straight.
Balderdash.
Clock's are a great tool to help us measure our days but our life is not defined by them. Our life is defined by eternity, something before which minutes and days and hours pale and disappear, leaving us with the moment. It's like the boy riding his bike in one of countless obscure villages, knowing this is his whole world, oblivious to the galaxy in which the earth is but a speck, that galaxy itself a small one among billions. And that is how it should be, for the boy is in the moment, something bigger than the galaxy itself, the only thing that touches eternity.
Time is a gift to enjoy, for it is life itself. And life is good. The vastness of eternity is like the galaxies, shaping everything yet untouchable, certainly unknowable. So we should be at peace and receive time as a gift to be lived with boundless joy.
Managed? Yes, surely, for we desperately need resourcefulness and efficiency, those dreaded but necessary words.
But the necessary things, like the clock, are servants, not masters. They, like all things, serve a greater good. One might slip backwards in etymology and remember “greater good” can only mean God. And when we find our life in Him we are clothed in eternity – “the eternal kind of life” is how the Gospels put it.
We find ourselves in time, a speck in eternity. Only God can make full sense of it, though we try. That's more than enough subtlety for me and I'll not waste any more time trying to figure it out.
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