Hi everyone,
Thanks again for opening this up and giving it a read! If you are in the USA, I hope you had a lovely Independence Day. If you are not in the USA, I hope you had a nice Tuesday.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Tend Your Time
Recently I’ve been exploring some “small and boring” ways to invest in your community. This series starts back here.
Warning: this is the section when I most likely will sound like a cranky old person.
Here’s a revolutionary thought: being on time is one of the smallest, most boring ways to honor someone else. Few people think that way. Tending your time well means putting other people first. It is maybe the quietest, most undervalued way to love someone.
It’s an old adage, but true: the way you spend your time, like it or not, tells on you. It broadcasts your priorities to the watching world. The same is true of your private time, though it’s not telegraphed in the same way.
Time spent is simply a way of observing what is important to you. This is a hard thing to grasp. When we wake up in the morning every day, we must again make the decision to spend time on what is important, not merely urgent. I have to return some emails; I have to run the dishwasher because someone forgot last night; there’s that thing I have to buy online -- it’s neverending.
When urgent things call to us, we have to set up a fence around the important things. A few minutes spent on spiritual disciplines realigns the day and priorities for a moment. It doesn’t feel “urgent” -- but it is important. Faithfully done over days, weeks and years, this little habit of managing the important over the urgent makes the way for a love for God’s word.
With the advent of texting and smartphones came along a byproduct that we perhaps weren’t anticipating: the power to keep one’s options open. To illustrate this point, let’s explore a scenario: meeting up with friends for coffee and some planning for your year ahead. You’ve decided with your friends that it would benefit all of you to have time to work on goals and look at your calendar for the next year.
In the year 1990: you set a time, date, and location to meet. You either write this down on your paper calendar or make a mental note to be there. When the time and date arrive, you either show up or you don’t. If you don’t show up, your friends wonder what happened to you, but they very likely won’t panic, as this was something that happened from time to time. However, if you miss meetings consistently, you gain a reputation as a bit of a flake.
In the year 2019 (at this writing): you set a time and date to meet, but you’ve got a couple of other options for that day. You say you’ll send a text, later on, to figure out where to meet. The day before the meeting, you figure out where you will meet. In between these two conversations, you’ve been handed (via social media and email) about a hundred different opportunities for that time slot. You’ve got a couple of second options in mind, and you might try to squeeze one or two of them in on the way, or right after, you meet with your friends.
You wake up late the morning you’re supposed to meet them, check all your social media, and -- whoops! It’s already ten minutes from when you’re supposed to be there. You shoot them a text -- “Sorry guys, just woke up, on my way now” (a lie -- but this is acceptable now, right?), and twenty minutes later, you’re on your way to meet them. You remember the other things you might have done at this time. You decide to cut out early. Your friends are used to this behavior (they do it too), so no one really showed up on time, and no one is staying till the agreed-upon end time. There are too many options for that day, and something better might come up. And -- do I really need to add this? -- not very much planning for the year ahead happens.
One rather large thing to manage -- one that’s become a reality only in the last fifteen years -- is the omnipresence of options and choices offered to us by smartphones. These handy little supercomputers that we carry around in our pockets have handed us more than convenience. They are beginning to rewire our brains and the way that we approach the way we spend our time. They allow us to “keep our options open” in a whole new way, one that can be helpful, but in my opinion, is largely unhelpful.
Keeping our options open allows us to neglect the “muscle” of committing to things. We pursue what we think is the very definition of freedom -- not being obligated. But in fact, we are prisoners to urgency. We are held hostage by the next notification, the next screen to scroll to, and the story we need to read. We cannot be our truest, most authentic versions of ourselves when we’re governed by the urgent. Instead, we are most “free” when we live in accordance with the truth -- with what God has ordained for us for that day - whether that be rolling into church on time or cleaning up spit-up and arriving late.
“The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.” Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism
For the Anglophiles
An average day, really.
Reads & Listens of the Week
With Friendship in Decline, Belonging is a Powerful Apologetic: When he was asked how people might best share their faith, Sam Allberry started with friendship and love: “…a place not only where truth is made known but also where a unique form of love is found. In reaching the Western world today, few things can be as important.”
Archeo-pizza! Researchers believe they might have uncovered evidence of an ancient relative of pizza.
This article is pretty self-referential at times, but I agree with the main point: “The belief that we’re entitled to high-quality information in almost every form — and will accept lower-quality stuff if it is free — is one big reason that the current state of American discourse looks and sounds like a WWE match….”
It’s kind of Katelyn Beaty to contribute in the spirit of little ways to commit to your community: Why I still go to church on Sundays.
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. - CS Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”
I’m all in on the punctuality discussion! When I did the fellows program, we had to write a paper about our “governing values” - the principles that dictate our decision-making - and punctuality was near the top for me. The only trouble was, we had to defend our values in light of the life of Jesus - that man was NEVER on time! 😬 (I concluded much like you did - that punctuality is a way of honoring others and communicating their worth. A tangible way to embody what Simone Weil said: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”