faith and work on Spending Time

In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do; it is not really the time but the will that is lacking.

A little girl once wrote a letter to an advice column in the Newspaper. In it, she tells a story about her uncle and aunt. “My uncle was the tightest man I ever met.” She said. “All his life, every ti...

It’s no secret that too many evangelical leaders are captivated more by business culture than biblical culture, spending more time absorbed in strategies and effectiveness and relatively little time i...

Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord. —Matthew Desmond, E...

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard t...

The other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. “The cos...

Living 24/6 feels like magic and here’s why: it seems to defy the laws of physics, as it both slows down time and gives us more of it. I laugh a lot more on that day without screens. I notice everythi...

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.

It is estimated the average person will spend 150,000 hours at work in his or her lifetime. That translates to roughly 40 percent of our lives being spent at work. That’s a lot. As a result, our work,...

Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle...It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath.

Ignoring God's Stop Sign Have you ever been driving and inadvertently blown right through a stop sign?  It happened to me recently. Anne and I were down in San Francisco meeting some friends, I w...

[A time comes] when we yearn for more of God than our schedules will allow.

A well-spent Sabbath we feel to be a day of heaven upon earth.

I might not be the best person to be writing this.  After an eleven-year career in business in my twenties and early thirties, I’ve been an ordained pastor now for nearly twenty-seven years. There are...

An understanding and living of Sabbath time can help support a sane and holy rhythm of life for us. With it, we are given an alternative to the culture’s growing movement between driven achievement an...

A New York Times story reports on the positive impact school recess has on academic performance. Here’s how it begins: “The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take t...

The key to time management at the end of the day is simple: you need to know where you are going and focus on the things that will get you there.

Our Sabbath project grew out of a desire to reclaim some of the unhurried wonder of those early days of parenthood—to see what would happen if, on one day out of seven, we stopped working, striving, a...

O God, in the course of this busy life, give us times of refreshment and peace; and grant that we may so use our leisure to rebuild our bodies and renew our minds, that our spirits may be opened to th...

Shabbat is like nothing else. Time as we know it does not exist for these twenty-four hours, and the worries of the week soon fall away. A feeling of joy appears. The smallest object, a leaf or a spoo...

As early as April 2020, a debate raged about the responsibilities of those of us turned safely inside during this global storm. For those time privileged enough to find their calendars suddenly cleare...

Sabbath reminds us that “our time” was never our time in the first place. All time is God’s time.

Your body knows about schedules. It gets used to those times of day when it says, Feed me right now. I’m hungry, and those times of night when it says, Get me to bed. I’m exhausted. Your body will spe...

Make a Sabbath box. When you set aside time for Sabbath—whether it is an hour, a morning, or a day—put in the box those things you do not want to use…. You can also use the Sabbath box to hold all the...

Rest has never been one of America’s greatest strengths. According to one study, only one in seven adults (14%) have set aside an entire day for the purpose of rest. For those who do set aside an enti...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

In contrast (and contradiction) to cultural mindlessness (that can hardly be underestimated!): The Sabbath and its observance may cultivate a theological mindfulness. . . . How so? The Sabbath sanctif...

We talk about our work all the time. It is rare that a conversation with a person we have recently met does not at some point lead to the inevitable question, What do you do? by which we mean, how do ...

Of course, speed has a role in the workplace. A deadline can focus the mind and spur us on to perform remarkable feats. The trouble is that many of us are permanently stuck in deadline mode, leaving l...