What
is it that virtually every one of us wishes to have more of?
Time.
We
citizens of Western civilization, and likely Eastern civilization, find
ourselves living in internet time – when information increases exponentially at
warp speed, and our lives often seemed frenzied collections of non-stop activities.
Our
mobile phones, our tablets, and our apps allow us to maintain schedules
unthinkable even one generation ago.
And
if we were asked what we would like to do with extra time, more than few of us
would likely say “rest.”
In
the concluding chapter of The Sabbath
World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, Judith Shulevitz calls this “mobile time,” as
opposed to what for thousands of years has been “mechanical time.” And, she
asks, “Mobile time is the time we’re in charge of, and who would want to
lose that?”
I read that statement, and I thought
about raising my hand.
Mobile time – internet time – has erased
the boundaries between work and the rest of our lives, to the point where work
is becoming the rest of our lives. My cell phone was off on Saturday (the
battery had died and I had to recharge the new one for 24 hours). When I turned
it on, I had 24 new email messages from work, including one unexpected email
with instructions for work that had to be ready Monday morning.
Two months ago, I would have spent
part of Saturday or Sunday frantically getting the work done for Monday. But
now I’m drawing boundaries. The work will have to wait until Monday, replacing
work or meetings already scheduled. Or perhaps not happening at all.
Reading The Sabbath World has
helped in this drawing of boundaries, but it’s only been a contributing factor.
The most important thing has been my stubborn insistence that work is no longer
invading every other part of my life. If the work is not important enough to
resource properly, then it’s not important enough for me to blow my weekend
doing it.
Will there be consequences? Likely
not. Internet time forces everything at work to be classified as urgent, and
everything to be considered a crisis. I know the work well enough to tell the
difference between the urgent and the important.
Internet time also erases any notion
of the Sabbath, of taking a day of rest whether we spend that day at church,
napping, or getting away from the cell phone.
Why is this important? Why did God
rest on the seventh day of creation? Shulevitz has an answer, and it’s a good
one: “God stopped to show us what we create becomes meaningful only once we
stop creating it and start remembering why it was created in the first place.
Or…why it wasn’t worth creating, why it isn’t up to snuff and should be
created anew.”
We can’t live for long in a world of
first drafts and “good enough to get by for now.”
We’re reading The Sabbath World
over at The HighCalling. To see the discussion about this
week’s chapter, please visitthe site.
Photograph by George Hodan via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
