With the growth of my family, a difficult adjustment for me has been accepting that my time is not my own. My calendar, once completely open to the whims of youthful impulse, is now filled with school pickups and doctor’s visits. Even my limited “free time” can quickly evaporate when a child shows the first sniffle.
I’m tempted to try to “have it all” by overloading my calendar. I tell myself that if I schedule with precision and do not deviate from it, I can keep up with all the duties of my state in life without sacrificing my job, friendships, volunteer commitments, and prayer life.
The insidious nature of this temptation is the lie that busyness equals virtue: that slowing down is a vice. Unfortunately, this desire to overcommit removes the possibility of unplanned moments. In the Gospel, we hear of the Lord on his way to see the dying daughter of Jairus (Mk 5:21-34). On the trek, Our Lord pauses to speak to a woman who has been healed of a hemorrhage by touching his cloak. Our Lord could have kept to his plan with the precision of a train schedule; however, he paused for this unplanned encounter in which the woman’s life changed forever.
In our own lives, it can be easy to fall into the temptation to take on more work and seek productivity above all, but it is those ordinary moments, those pauses, in which grace often operates. The challenge is to get used to saying “No” to busyness in order to say “Yes” to the unplanned moments of grace. It is in those moments that we learn how to spend our time well versus simply spending our time.
(Trevor Sorensen lives with his wife and children in northern Indiana. He is the Senior Director of Finance for Seton Education Partners.
