As a new year begins, chatter about time management and productivity abound. Our social media feeds are filled with strategies for making the most of our weeks. Articles share the top five hacks for becoming more efficient. Lists of resolutions prioritize maximizing our moments and optimizing our days.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with taking time a bit more seriously. But, as Jen Pollock Michel points out, when we try to fill up our hours with meaningful tasks, we may actually feel worse at the end of the day. The problem is not our desire for clean closets or streamlined schedules. Instead, it’s the fact that we are approaching time as merely something to manage rather than something to receive.
Michel explains, “Just as there once was sacred space (in the medieval cathedrals, for example), there was also once sacred time.” Monks and nuns, for example, lived in that sacred time. But now, we simply see time as the constraint forever limiting our to-do lists.
But God offers us a better way.
“In the kingdom of productivity, the goal is to get more and more done in less and less time,” Michel writes. “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.”
May 2023 be a year when we reclaim sacred time, receiving our days as a gift from God.
