In The New Year, We Must View Time Through A Divine Lens: To Dust We Will Return

Christianity Today:  To Dust We Will Return, by Jen Pollock Michel (Author, In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace (2023)): 

In the New Year, we must view our time through a divine lens.

Just as there once was sacred space (in the medieval cathedrals, for example), there was also once sacred time. Kairos time, as the Greeks called it: this time existing beyond the veil of a day and the standardized unit of an hour. In fact, prior to the Reformation, we looked to the monks and nuns to renounce earthly pleasures and commit themselves to prayer. They lived the Lord’s time for the rest of us.

Today, of course, no one really lives the Lord’s time. All we’re left with is chronos time and the successive moments “which we try to measure and control in order to get things done.” ... All we’re left with is ordinary time—and the relentless goad of productivity. The untested assumption today is that getting things done is an infallible good, never mind the relative worth of those “things” and the predictable irritability involved in the striving.

Perhaps one of the most important discipleship endeavors today is reforming our relationship with time—and encouraging practices of living time more fittingly, more faithfully, more joyfully, more hopefully. The habits of “higher time” don’t have much to do with traditional time management advice, tips and tricks, or techniques and tools.

There is an important difference between improved executive functioning—and the practice of time—faith.

Habits of higher time have little to do with time-savvy. Calendaring may be involved, but mostly these habits involve a “labor of vision,” to borrow a phrase from another writer. Despite our best efforts at productivity, our lives will fog, and then evaporate, like winter breath. We will die.

As the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field” (Isa. 40:6, ESV throughout). We will not finish all we’ve begun, will not accomplish all we’ve intended. Life will chill, the days shorten, and our bodies will catch in death’s wind and fall like autumn leaves.

Dust to dust. We will get no second chances on mortal time and its gifts.

If we fail to see time stretching beyond the final shudder, beyond the final slow wheeze of life, we are people to be pitied.

Habits of higher time require important unlearning: about time as instrument, about time as aspiration, about time as commodity, something to spend and waste. Habits of higher time don’t seek efficiency at all costs, especially as its project involves the slow growth of wisdom. Higher time invites each of us into a different imagining of time, which is to say the generous sweep of heavenly time, where God’s will is being done without delay or haste.

In the kingdom of productivity, the goal is to get more and more done in less and less time. Speed is success. In the kingdom of heaven, by contrast, there is no cheating the time it really takes: to visit the widow, to welcome the outcast, to cultivate a vocation, to tend a marriage, to raise a child, to nurture a friendship, to grow a deeply formed life.

In the world of heavenly time, which remains rather indifferent to the urgent ticking of the clock, we are free to be still, free to be small, free to take refuge in the one who was and is and ever will be God.

In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace (2023): 

"Time belongs not to us but to God," contends Michel. Lambasting time management strategies that prioritize productivity, Michel argues that readers must instead accept that "there is always enough time to do what God has planned." Michel succeeds in putting earthly concerns in cosmic perspective. These insightful musings are worth a look.—Publishers Weekly

Whether we're trying to find time, save it, manage it, or make the most of it, one word defines our relationship with the clock: anxiety. Yet is productivity really the only grid for the good life? Have you ever imagined a life without hurry, relentless work, multitasking, or scarcity? A life that is characterized instead by presence, attention, rest, rootedness, fruitfulness, and generosity?

This is the kind of life we are meant for, says Jen Pollock Michel. But if we want to experience freedom from time anxiety, we have to reimagine our relationship with time itself.

In the pages of In Good Time, she invites you to disentangle your priorities from our modern assumptions and instead ground them in God's time. Then she shows you how to establish 8 life-giving habits that will release you from the false religion of productivity so you can develop a grounded, healthy, life-giving relationship with the clock.

From the Back Cover

Reclaim your life from the tyranny of your schedule.

Whether we're trying to find time, save it, manage it, or make the most of it, one word defines our relationship with the clock: anxiety. Is productivity really the only grid for the good life? Have you ever imagined a life without hurry, relentless work, multitasking, or scarcity? A life that is characterized instead by presence, attention, rest, rootedness, fruitfulness, and generosity?

This is the kind of life we are meant for, says Jen Pollock Michel. But if we want to experience freedom from time anxiety, we have to reimagine our relationship with time itself.

In the pages of In Good Time, she invites you to disentangle your priorities from our modern assumptions and instead ground them in God's time. Then she shows you how to establish eight life-giving habits that will release you from the false religion of productivity so you can develop a grounded, healthy relationship with the clock.

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