Time Management and I

non-subject: a place in time
AWW, 11/14/12

I struggle with "time management."

Actually, I don't struggle with it; I abhor it.

Business prides itself on punctuality. Great.

But when it comes to living things...to breathing, pulsating bodies that move and walk and swim, that cry and laugh and whisper, that slumber and run and wait...punctuality has a different meaning than being on time by the clock.

Just think, if we could structure a culture that ran not by the clock, but by the heart.

In a sense the heart is a type of clock; it ticks.

At some point in the past three decades as I've struggled with "time management," the realization hit me: I don't manage time, I move through time. I manage my responses and actions, not the time.

The time is like the sky with its blazing stars. To our eye the stars do not move: the planets move. Our concept of time is determined by that still-appearing sun.

At some point a human invented a dial to have the shadows tell us the time.

Now us humans can digitally watch time in nanoseconds. I think we'd be well served to go back to the sundial and shadows.

The Way had a saying in the 1990s, maybe in the 1980s and 2000s too. The saying was, "Plan the devil out of your life." It reminds me of that old saying that "Idle time is the devil's workshop," or the scripture that states, "Redeeming the time because the days are evil."

In The Way, all activity was to be profitable for the movement of the Word, which brings to mind corporate America; sadly profit is the bottom line and people are too often the merchandise.

The words "corps" and "corporation" have the same root.

When I was in-residence Way Corps in the early 1980s, most all our time was planned for us. We had little "free" time. Later "free" time was termed "self-structure" time.

When I was a new Christian and before becoming a loyal follower of The Way International I had gone to college partly to learn Greek and Hebrew so I could answer my many questions to Bible contradictions. As I sat on my lower bunk tying my shoe in my dorm room at Montreat College, I was saying to myself, "I tie my shoe in the name of the Lord Jesus." My heart wanted to do the will of God and Colossians commanded to do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.

At the time I was prime picking for The Way, ripe for the harvest; I had already begun planning the devil out of my life, which really...was planning him in. And The Way appeared punctually for the harvest.

Without idle time, inventions would never be conceived.

No wonder I abhor time management.