6 Working Days in Every Weekend


Here is a quote from Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places.

“The understanding and honoring of time is fundamental to the realization of who we are and how we live. Violations of sacred time become desecrations of our most intimate relations with God and one another. Hours and days, weeks and months and years, are the very stuff of holiness.

Among the many desecrations visited upon creation, the profanation of time ranks near the top, at least among North Americans. Time is the medium in which we do all our living. When time is desecrated, life is desecrated. The most conspicuous evidences of this desecration are hurry and procrastination: Hurry turns away from the gift of time in a compulsive grasping for abstractions that it can possess and control. Procrastination is distracted from the gift of time in a lazy inattentiveness to the life of obedience and adoration by which we enter the ‘fullness of time.’ Whether by a hurried grasping or by a procrastinating inattention, time is violated.”

Whether or not you are a Christian the concept of the value of time is something you probably know too well. In fact it is probably not an abstract concept for most people. It is a day-to-day struggle. I have been thinking about this comment ever since I read it. Right now I am struggling to get my life back into balance. I have been working more than I would like to.

I love the paradox of hurry and procrastination. Peterson writes about. When I think about it I know that I am often in a hurry and often procrastinating. If I considered time to be sacred I would neither waste it by procrastinating or miss it by hurrying through my life. So what is one to do?

Today I wondered if it is possible to have a job that is fulfilling but does not take over your life. I also have wondered how much of my busyness is choice and how much I have no control over. All I know is that I am keenly aware right now that time is sacred and I am guilty of desecrating it.

Many have written about our fast-paced society and how we should slow down. I haven’t seen any really good answers. Right now I feel like a gerbil on its wheel. I just keep going and going. The faster I go, the faster I need to go to keep up because the next rung is upon me. Oh how I wish I could get off.

Twenty years from now are people going to look at the way we live now and wonder how we managed to live at such a slow pace?

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