Donna Schaper - Never Enough Time: A Practical and Spiritual Guide

Never Enough Time

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

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So many of us lament that we just wish we had more time that the phrase might be our national anthem. We have bad timing as an explanation for so many things gone wrong. We ache for good timing, attributing to it most of the success people find in life. We give our children time-outs to manage their behavior. We have really weird relationships with time, even though time is as ordinary as ordinary can be.

Bad timing is not just an accident; it is a consequence of particular ways of life and thinking. Many of us have tried in vain to change this consequencereading everything we can find about time management in the self-help section of the bookstore or on the Internet. We have also prayed our hearts out. In this book, we will examine its sources and try to find alternatives, aiming for the joy of good timing and offering practical and spiritual advice to those starved for time. We will discover a spiritual reorientation to this time famine that deposits spiritual wisdom into practical alternatives. The spiritual will shake hands with the practical, and the practical with the spiritual, and we will motivate ourselves to feast on time and accept the permission the universe grants us to do so. We will become creatures first and creative second. We will learn that our time famine comes from a deep spiritual debtmaybe even a spiritual emptiness or hollowness. We will stop trying to justify our existence through activity and move into the realm of reflected activity. We will start feasting on time.

What do we mean when we say we dont have enough time? Why is there such a large time famine in the richest country in the world? How can we who eat so much be so starving for something we actually do have?

The chapters belong to each other. They begin, in the first six, with the spiritual analysis of why we dont have enough time. They end, in the last six, with the practical possibilities of getting to enough time. The first chapter discusses the ways we double-time just about everything. Here, I dont mean multitasking so much as trying to please more than one master: worshiping God and Mammon and ending up dancing a two-step that exhausts us.

The second chapter reflects on Noah and his renewal of Gods promise. It speaks of the importance of numbers and counting and sizing up just how bad things really are among us time-famished people, advocating a life in numbers and in limitations.

The third chapter uses water as an image for time. Hidden right there in plain sight, rarely noticed or appreciated, we miss the glory by taking water and its flow for granted, as we do with time. There is something wrong when we dont see things as they are. We get hurt.

The fourth chapter talks about intimacy with God and about the many faces of Godscriptures and the Golden Ruleproposing that the purpose of life is to love God and enjoy God forever.

The fifth chapter acknowledges that we are in reality people with too much time on our hands, noting that time scarcity is a privilegea first world problem. Of course, the poorest among us have a time famine, too: so run around are they from one agency to another, trying to get help; so oppressed are they by misguided people who think their poverty is their own fault. This book looks from the first world at the first world and its time famine.

The sixth chapter talks about making all things newor at least something newand how we doubt we are the kind of people who can be renewed. This is the Easter chapter.

Throughout the book, I talk about sin, defining it as missing the mark of our true humanity, being curved in on ourselves or self-obsessed, and being distant from God. By these definitions of sin, I dont mean something small: I mean something large that really affects our days and hours and minutes. I also imagine a beautiful repentance where we turn toward cohesion and clarity as people. By God I mean something larger than ourselves; some call this Creator, Jesus, breath, Yahweh, Allah, or the force at the heart of the matter. There is no need to keep God in a Christian cage to address the time trouble from spiritual and spirited windows.

The second set of six chapters focuses on the practical expressions of these spiritual windows. I try to keep us off the how for as long as possible because some of that pragmatism is at the root of the spiritual crisis around time. I also respect the pragmatism and try to be spiritually pragmatic and pragmatically spiritual. You could decide to read the book chapter by chapter and understand my privileging of the spiritual, cultural, and economic sources. Or you could read chapter 1 and chapter 7, then chapter 2 and chapter 8, and so on. Take your choice. And above all, take your time.

Very few people feel they have enough time, and many people feel they are time famished. It is the rare, blessed individual who has found his or her way to time sufficiencymuch less time feastspiritually as well as materially. Have you ever heard someone give thanks or praise for being time hungry? I have. These are people who have not only accepted the conditions of the time famine but learned how to live at peace within them. Instead of being spiritually bothered by the material reality of time scarcity, we learn to love time and its sufficiency. We stop whining about not having enough time. We learn to swim in the time we do have. Some of us even trick the time famine into being time abundance.

We have so little time that we dont even have time to find out why we dont have enough time. But it is possible that there is plenty of time, that the universe has already made all the time that ever will be. Here I offer an expensive luxury: a deep look at why we feel we dont have enough time, when it is likely that we have all the time there could be. There may be plenty while we experience scarcity or enough in the places where we feel there is not.