The Great Rush
The first alarm goes off at 6am.
I calculate, half-conscious, exactly how much sleep I can still extract before the second one at 6:20, and then I go back under for those 20 minutes like a diver taking one last breath. At 6:20 the smart lights come up and the negotiation is over.
30 minutes until I have to leave. Hair brushed fast, sunscreen, coffee started while I’m still moving, morning devotion, scrubs, lunch, keys. I nearly forget the trash and double back for it. Then I check the clock and see I have 45 minutes to make the drive, and I go, holding steady under the limit but wanting to be over it, because somewhere on that stretch there could be an accident or construction or a stalled car, and I would rather leave the house absurdly early than arrive even 5 minutes late. I have always been this way. I hate being late.
At work I’m efficient as pharmacists tend to be, trimming my own break to protect my exit time. Then I leave and drive to the gym with 20 minutes to arrive, change, and warm up before class starts. Class ends and I calculate whether an errand fits before I have to get home. Then Colin, or one of the several things that fill the evenings he isn’t with me. Dinner. Homework. Time with God. Some attempt at unwinding.
And then the alarm again at 6.
What unsettled me, though, is a sentence I recently realized I say internally maybe 40 times a day: I just have to get through this, and then I can get to the next thing.
I have to get through this cycling class so I can get through rush hour. I have to get through rush hour so I can get through making dinner. Each thing exists as an obstacle standing between me and the thing after it, and the thing after it is likewise an obstacle. I am forever clearing hurdles toward a finish line that recedes exactly as fast as I approach it.
The consequence shows up at scale. I look back over a stretch of weeks, sometimes months, and cannot recover them. Not because nothing happened. Enormous amounts happened. But it went by at a speed that left no sediment, and what should be memory is instead a smear.
The standard prescription for this is to “slow down.” Be present. Practice mindfulness. Cherish the time God has given you. “Stop and smell the roses” kinda thing.
Because what does it actually mean to slow down when the schedule is inflexible? When there is a shift that starts at a fixed hour, a child who must be collected at a specific door, a class that begins whether or not I’ve arrived? I cannot pull over to admire a field when I have a 45 minute window to cover a 45 minute drive. For people situated like me, stopping to smell the roses is itself a thing that must be scheduled, which strikes most people as a contradiction and strikes me as practical.
And there’s a second problem, which is that this prescription assumes a temperament.
I do rest. I rest constantly. But my rest is active: a dance class, a table of people, movement, conversation, something being made. Sitting alone in silence contemplating a flower is not restorative to me and never has been. It is closer to a chore. Yet the contemplative model is presented, in Christian teaching especially, as the mature form of the thing, with everything else filed under distraction.
The passage deployed against people like me is always the same one. Martha is occupied with serving; Mary sits at Jesus’ feet; Jesus says Mary has chosen the better portion (Luke 10:38–42).
The sermon writes itself: stop working, sit down, be Mary. Except that isn’t exactly what the text says.
Jesus tells Martha she is “anxious and troubled about many things.” The two verbs are merimnaō, to be pulled apart by worry, and thorybazō, from the root for an uproar, a commotion, a crowd making noise. He does not name her serving as the problem. He names the internal condition the serving has produced: a woman divided, clamorous inside, coming to Him not with a request but with an accusation about her sister.
Nowhere does Jesus disparage hospitality. He receives it constantly. He is receiving it in that very house. Elsewhere Scripture treats service as evidence of faith rather than a competitor to it. What He identifies in Martha is the internal noise, the fracture, the resentment that had begun to ooze out unchecked.
Which means the trouble may not be my pace. It may be what I do inside my pace. A woman can move fast and remain whole. A woman can sit perfectly still and be torn to pieces.
Greek gave the New Testament writers 2 words where English gives us one, and the distinction is pretty interesting:
- Chronos is duration. Sequence. The clock, the calendar, the very measurable 45 minute drive.
- Kairos is the charged moment, the ripe opportunity, the point at which something can be done that cannot be done at any other point.
When Paul writes about “redeeming the time” in Ephesians 5:16, he uses kairos, and the verb is exagorazō, a commercial term meaning to buy out of the marketplace, to purchase entirely. He is not instructing anyone to reduce their chronos. He is instructing them to seize the kairos when it presents itself.
This is not a technicality. It means the biblical concern is not the velocity of my day. It’s whether, moving at whatever speed I’m moving, I recognize the moment when it comes and take it. Whether I notice that the 12 minutes in the car with Colin is a kairos and not merely a transit interval. The apostolic instruction assumes an occupied life and asks a different question of it than the one I keep being asked.
Moses prays similarly in Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Numbering is not slowing. Numbering is counting, valuing, holding an accurate reckoning of a limited quantity. He asks for wisdom about time, not less of it.
I could stop there, having successfully defended my calendar, and I don’t think I’d be entitled to.
Because the Sabbath is not offered as a temperament option. It is written into the structure of creation itself, before any law was given, when God rested on the seventh day and set it apart (Genesis 2:2–3). It is embedded in the Decalogue among the weightiest moral commands. And it was given to a people who had just come out of Egypt, where they had been worked without ceasing, which means the command is explicitly an assertion that human beings are not what they produce.
I cannot get around that by pointing out that I’m extroverted. The rhythm of ceasing is commanded, and my personality does not exempt me from it.
So what does that mean? Perhaps it means a wider view of what ceasing looks like.
The body has many members that do not have the same function (1 Corinthians 12:14–20). Contemplative practice is a gift, sure, but it is one gift, not the universal standard against which the rest of us are graded and found distractible. Sabbath for me may look like a table of people and a long meal rather than a silent room. But it has to look like something, and it has to be a genuine cessation rather than some kind of rebranded errand.
Jesus moved through an extraordinarily dense schedule too. Crowds pressed on Him. He was interrupted constantly, sometimes mid-errand, and He was interrupted on the way to raise a dying girl by a woman who touched His garment, and He stopped for her (Mark 5:21–34).
He was busy and He was never hurried. And John locates the source of that difference precisely: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God,” rose and washed feet (John 13:3–4). The unhurriedness proceeded from settledness about origin and destination. He was not rushing toward something He needed to secure, because it was already secured.
That, I suspect, is the actual error. I just have to get through this and then I can get to the next thing is the language of someone treating the present as a toll to be paid. It presumes the good is elsewhere, always slightly ahead, never here. And that’s a theological error before it’s a scheduling one, because it locates God’s presence in the future exclusively and treats the current 20 minutes as a stretch of road with nothing in it.
So I don’t think I’m called to dismantle my calendar…. I think I’m called to stop treating each square of it as an obstacle.
To arrive at the cycling class and be at the cycling class, rather than at the rush-hour drive I’m already dreading. To hold the days accurately, which is the numbering Moses asked for, rather than blurring them into a single undifferentiated push toward a finish line that isn’t there.
While i’m still working this out within myself, the alarm still goes off at 6 and I still calculate my 20 minutes. But I’ve stopped believing the answer is a slower life, and started suspecting it’s a less absent one.
