by Dorothy C. Bass

Do we really have time to live faithfully? As our society moves to a 24/7 pattern where the shopping never stops and communications devices are everywhere, many feel trapped between the lines of our to–do lists. In this context, time–honored rhythms of prayer, rest, and worship can prepare us for bold and courageous living.

One Saturday night several years ago, some friends and I had dinner at a nice restaurant. It was a beautiful spring evening, but we were having trouble relaxing because we were thinking about tomorrow. After putting in a quick appearance at church, each of us planned to spend most of the day grading papers that we had to return to our students on Monday. "I can’t believe I have 30 essays to read," one of us whined. "Thirty?" harrumphed another, "I’ve got 50!" Each of us silently computed the number of pages stacked on our desks and sighed loudly. I’ve never been sure whether we were complaining or boasting about how busy, how indispensable, how burdened we were.

But there was one thing I did know with a sudden burst of awareness: "Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy" was the farthest thing from our minds. Was it true that we were deliberately planning to violate one of the commandments? I could not imagine this group sitting around saying, "I’m going to take God’s name in vain," or "I’m planning to commit adultery," or "I think I’ll steal something." Yes, we might occasionally break one of the other commandments ("You shall not covet" can be especially challenging for me), but we would hardly boast about the transgression. Our approach to the Sabbath commandment was different. We had become so captivated by our work, so impressed by its demands and our own indispensability that the Sabbath had simply vanished from our consciousness.

Pressures on Our Time
Why is it so hard to relax our grip on our busyness — or to allow it to relax its grip on us? Many reasons exist. For one, many of us simply have too much to do. Complex social and economic changes have put the squeeze on American workers at every level, so that Americans now have less time off than workers in any other developed country. Our to-do lists have grown outside the realm of paid employment as we chauffeur children to multiple activities and try to keep up with obligations within our households, congregations, and communities. Since so much is available virtually at any hour of the day or night — shopping, communication (with each other and from media sources), and so forth — finding time that is free in a deep and satisfying sense is becoming quite a challenge.

Some would say that, more than anything, we need to learn to manage our time better. I have nothing against this suggestion and have benefited from keeping a datebook, clarifying priorities, and planning ahead. Important as these aids are, however, they are finally inadequate. Management techniques cannot address the concerns at the heart of our difficulties with time.

Our attitudes toward time raise issues of identity and conscience that provide remarkable windows into our spirituality. When we despair over our failure to get everything done, the passage of time becomes a source of guilt and judgment. We forget how to luxuriate in time that is not filled with tasks. We fume with anger at those who keep us waiting or fritter away their own time. We delude ourselves into believing that if we could just get ahead of the crush and tie up all those loose ends, we would prove our worth and establish ourselves in safety. And in the process, we embrace a false theology: We come to believe that our worth depends on our own management and accomplishments.

The truth is that we are never going to get everything done. We are mortals who are given a limited number of hours each day across the span of days whose number we do not know. As we sing in Isaac Watts’s great hymn, "time like an ever–rolling stream soon bears us all away." We will never have enough time to satisfy the needs of our neighbors or even to complete all the tasks on our personal to–do lists. We are foolish when we stake our sense of worth on this. This is a form of pressure we will never be able to bear.

The Good News of Freedom
What sounds like bad news, however, can actually prepare us to perceive a gracious and joyful truth: We do not have to earn our salvation through chores accomplished or busiest-mom–n–town awards. In baptism, God has promised to love us even when we don’t get everything done.

"This is the day the Lord has made!" sings the psalmist. "Let us rejoice and be glad in it!" What would it mean to receive a day we know is going to be as full of mercy as it is of obligations? Receiving each day as a gift from God is impossible if we are stewing about yesterday’s lingering failures or dreading tomorrow’s impending demands. But as Martin Luther declared, the forgiveness we have received in baptism "remains day by day as long as we live" and thus opens a better way of living. Remembering our baptism, we receive each new day as people who are free from bondage to the past and fear of the future. When we accept this freedom, our energies are released for bold and creative living.

Living in this freedom day after day is not easy, especially in a time–obsessed society such as ours. When we act as individuals, embracing our freedom is virtually impossible. As Christians, however, we belong to a community that operates on a calendar that prepares us for freedom. By organizing time in ways that remind us again and again of God’s gracious presence, this calendar conditions us to trust God’s promises as we move through the rhythms of time each day, each week, and each year.

Moving to the Rhythms of Grace
The first rhythm is the rhythm of daily prayer. In personal devotions, we acknowledge that this day is the day that God has made, a day in which to remember the forgiveness and share the love of God as we go out into the world attuned to God’s presence and our neighbor’s needs. Saying grace before a meal transforms it from just consuming fuel for the body into shared gratitude with others and with God. Bedtime prayers acknowledge our dependence on God as we slip into the vulnerability of sleep. Amid cultural pressures to eat supper together less frequently and to fall into bed so tired that we forget to say our prayers, it is important to nurture these rhythms of grace.

The second rhythm sets aside one day each week for rest and worship. When we observe the Sabbath, we gain much more than a break in our schedules. Putting aside our busyness, we open ourselves to God’s redeeming presence and receive the world as God’s creation and ourselves as God’s beloved children. The Sabbath offers a fresh perspective on the other days of the week — good days during which important work is done, but days that can become so full that we forget just who it is that keeps the world turning. In keeping the Sabbath, we practice stepping off the treadmill of work and spend. We begin to disengage from a consumer culture and to coexist with nature and other people within the plenty of God’s creation. We proclaim Christ’s victory over death.

The third rhythm wraps the entire year in an annual procession of seasons, feasts, and fasts. The patterns of the year connect the now — the vulnerable present in which we mortals live — to the foundational stories of our faith. We prepare for Christ’s birth and celebrate once again the mystery that God has come to dwell with us. We put away the word "alleluia" for the 40 days of Lent and follow Jesus into the wilderness and then to calvary. When Easter comes, startling us yet again, we shout "Christ is risen! Alleluia!" As we celebrate the yearly rhythms of our Christian faith, our lives become part of an ancient and ongoing drama, and our mortal existence is caught up in the immortal life of God.

These gracious rhythms of the day, the week, and the year do not lengthen our days or give us more control over them. We must still grade our papers and drive our children to their activities. But when our tasks are framed by a constant reminder of God’s loving presence, we take them up, and we lay them down at the end of a day or a lifetime in a different way. As participants in Christian practices that help us receive time as a gift, we are preparing for lives of gratitude and service. We discover companions with whom to share time and the other gifts of God. We expand our capacity to understand ourselves and the world as belonging not to Father Time with his pocket watch or digital readout, but to God, the Creator and Lord of all that is. We practice — as both rehearsal and present reality — the freedom with which Christ has set us free.