Making the Most of Time

Sandtimer set against an art-glass panel from "The Parable of the Sowed Seed," First Presbyterian Church Edwardsville.

Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil.  –Ephesians 5:15-16

Paul’s phrase “making the most of time” has been important to me from early adult years. Back then, the way I understood it was shaped by the place I grew up, Flint, Michigan. Based around huge auto production facilities, ideas about industrial efficiency permeated our lives. By the time I was in high school, I was planning my classes and extracurricular activities on paper in large blocks of time. When I entered ministry, I finally could afford a Daytimer brand calendar and organizer, which I’ve used for 37 years. More often now, I turn to a smart phone and google calendar, but I still prefer my Daytimer.  I don’t have to recharge it, and it never needs an internet connection. 

Because I’m a pastor, it’s impossible to avoid thinking about the way time has a beginning and an end. All of my ministry, I’ve been aware that the life story my Daytimer calendar tells will end in a final page and a final entry. Then it will stop.  No more notes will be made; no more pages will be turned to prepare for the events of a new season.  Boxes of old Daytimer pages may linger on shelves for a few years. Then someday, my children will rummage through the boxes one last time, then throw them away. This is a sobering prospect, but I try to think of it as a kind of blessing. The reality that life ends in death forces me to consider whether I’m making the most of time.

This week, when I read this text, I wondered more about the phrase “the days are evil.” I usually think of each day as a blessing and an opportunity, so how are days evil? Maybe the answer is as simple as New Testament scholar Markus Barth says, as recognizing the days may be called evil “because of the moral evil abounding in them.”[1] Maybe it means humans could be working together to make the world a better place, but too often go on in the same old patterns of behavior leading to destruction.

Theologian  Brian McLaren has reflected on this sort of thing in his book “Beyond Doom,” describing four scenarios regarding the future of human civilization.  Will our current civilization continue to destabilize the earth’s life support systems, with a continuously downward spiral in the health of the environment and stability of civilization?  Or will our ways be changed in time for some measure of recovery? “We’re passengers on a brakeless economic runaway train,” McLaren argues, “engineered by and for … a global elite who amass more economic, media, and political power every second.”[2] If McLaren’s characterization is accurate, then it’s easy to see why we might agree with Paul’s observation that “the days are evil.”

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus said something that also has influenced how I think about time: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.” Jesus' words are set in the context of a lesson on suffering.  Encountering a man blind from birth, his disciples ask, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"  In Jesus' time, and on into our own, it was popular to believe that those born with disability were receiving punishment for the sins of their parents, or personal sin.  Jesus refuses to be caught up in unproductive arguments about the origin of suffering.  Instead, his approach feels more pragmatic.  Regardless of whose fault our problems are, he advises us to work to fix them while there is still time.

Pastor Melissa Bane Sevier offers a reflection that took my thoughts in one more direction. She says: “I read a fair amount in books about leadership and management.  They have much to say about making the most of our time.  You know the lists:

·  Avoid time wasters.

·  Limit meeting length by designing a tight agenda.

·  Balance face time, phone time, desk time.

·  Develop your speed and efficiency.

·  Delegate.

All good advice.  But it only goes as far as it goes.  I am one of those people who has to be constantly reminded that efficiency isn’t always the most important thing.  Making the most of my time doesn’t necessarily mean being able to check lots of things off my list.  Sure, my work has to be done.  But is being overrun (controlled) by tasks really making the most of our time?”[3]  In other words, is making the most of time a matter of carefully scheduling time? Or is it perhaps a matter of experiencing time in a different way?

I found a clue to what that might look like in another section of McLaren’s book, in which he ponders the possibility of the collapse of civilization, and end of humankind. In the worst-case scenario, what would a faithful Christian response look like? McLaren asks his readers to imagine the scenario of large parts of the earth becoming uninhabitable and unproductive, nations warring over scarce remaining resources, and finally a nuclear war in which clouds of deadly radiation drift toward the city where you and your family are living.

The thought experiment McLaren proposes touched me, and while a little long, seems worth sharing with you.  With hatred and chaos raging all around, how would you want people to spend their final day. “Would you want a young mother to sit at a table with her child and fill page after page with brightly colored paintings?” he asks. “Would you want a young boy to play with his dog, to throw a stick and take a walk, to tell him what a good dog he is and how much he loves him? Would you want a little girl to invite her friends out into the field and play ball and tell jokes and make their last day a good day? … Would you want the family to cook and share their favorite foods for their last meal together … and maybe plant a tree in the backyard at sunset? Late that night, would you want this family to hold one another tight and tell each other how much they love each other, and maybe even pray together in gratitude for every moment of life they have shared …? Would you see the way they spent their last day in that horrible situation as an expression of wisdom and courage? Would you consider their last day lived in that way a marvelous victory?”  There is, as McLaren says, “a motivation that goes deeper than hope as commonly understood … when all hope for a good outcome is gone.”  And to put a punctuation point on this as simply as I can, that motivation is love.[4] 

The old Presbyterian pastor and writer Henry Van Dyke wrote a poem about time that expresses something similar about a proper relationship to time.  I first heard it read during Princess Diana’s funeral. Van Dyke said,  “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”

NOTES

[1] Markus Barth, “Ephesians 4-6: A New Translation and Commentary,” The Anchor Bible, Vol. 34A, Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960, p. 579.

[2] Brian McLaren, “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart,” New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024, Introduction, p. 3.

[3] https://melissabanesevier.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/making-the-most-of-our-time/, accessed 15 August 2018.

[4] The quotations in this paragraph are from “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart,” chapter six, “Hope is Complicated.”

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