Making The Most Of The Time

My experience is that many, many times, I have asked God what I should do and many, many times that led me into adventures, doing things I would have been afraid to do, things that wouldn’t even occur to me to do on my own, things that are really worth getting out of bed for in the morning, things that stretched me no end. And now I look back and it’s been so good.

So the first thing to manage under time stress is the list of tasks you take on. You can’t do everything.

But there is another very important management skill that we all need, especially in our culture. Efficiency experts might call it managing your energy. I’ll call it caring for your soul.

At home I have a paper shredder. I am the registrar for the Rockford District Committee on Ministry and one of my jobs is to keep the files of about 20 people who are either serving today as local pastors or are in the process of preparing for ordination. And they go through a long process with a lot of work and documentation. And when they move up and are ordained, then I forward some of their paper work to the Board of Ordained Ministry, but one day I had a big stack of papers that needed to be shredded. And my shredder worked great for about 10 minutes. And then it just stopped. It was close to overheating. So I had to give it a few minutes to cool off, to recover.

Can anyone here identify with that? My paper shredder has the sense to stop when its getting overwhelmed. How about us?

If you are in the neighborhood somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 you might see me taking my dog for a walk around the block. I might say that its for the dog, and she does deserve it. But its also because its hard mental work to prepare a sermon and there comes a point where I need to step back and let all the clutter clear out.

Once upon a time there was a woodchopper

who had so much work to do they he just couldn’t stop to sharpen his axe. Did he ever catch up? He worked harder and harder. And his axe got duller and duller. And he got farther and farther behind.

Good time management is much more than figuring out how to cram more things into your day. Good time management requires doing the important things and taking care of your soul.

Remember the sabbath? The Hebrew word Shabbot means literally “to cease,” “to stop.” When our culture thinks about keeping a Sabbath we are likely to call that legalism and a waste of time.

How many of us need a day for just rest and renewal?

In the 23rd Psalm, King David was going through something difficult and yet when he looked for what God wanted of him, he discovered. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; 3 he restores my soul.

Some people may think it’s a waste of time, but one of the best pastoral practices I have found is to get away sometimes on my day off and hike on the levees down by the Mississippi. And the clutter in my head from a thousand things that need to be done slowly, usually unconsciously gets untangled. The number 1 tasks start to float to the top again and the number 3 tasks start to sink out of sight. My sense of wonder is restored as I search for those bright flashes of color of whichever birds are migrating through at the time and listen for their calls. That restores my soul. It puts it back the way it ought to be.