On the Clock

Did you ever have this thought, why am I running out of time? I mean, the clock sort of is controlling my life. Well, we're going to talk about that today. This is Dick Foth, by the way, and it's stories to make sense of it all. We're in chapter 16 of our book, Known, Finding Deep Friendships in a Shallow World, which the trajectory of the book has to do with how you build friendships. And one of the ways that you build friendships through covenant is with time. Chapter 16 is on the clock. I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo, so do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that has given us. J.R.R. Tolkien, the Fellowship of the Ring. Comes at commodity. It's commodity that is traded in your head. Here are the words associated with the word time. Gained, wasted, spent, invested, squandered, managed, lost, appreciated, taken, given, utilized, shared, granted, allocated, and fill in the blank with your own verb. Which great is that time is the big equalizer. We each have 24 hours to use. If a 70-year lifespan has 25,568 days accounting for leap years, that computes to over 613,000 hours. Subtract 8 hours a day for sleep, and you have about 407,000 hours to work with using any of the verbs just mentioned. The question is, whichever time is slippery as I'll get up, it leaks through cracks and pinholes. It evaporates with the tick of the clock and a day of a thousand distractions. How do we capture time to grow friendship? How do we allocate an invest time to build bonds and memories? Relationships don't happen with the tip of a hat or a hidden mistext stream. They develop because we give and take time. I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule applies. In the stimulating book Outliers, he speaks of people who master skills in music and math and technology. Studies conducted by neuroscientists showed that no matter the level of gifting, no one rose to the top of the heap without investing 10,000 hours of practice. Whether it was Bill Joy, often called the Edison of the Internet, or the Beatles who cut their musical IT's playing six hours at a time, night after night, and clubs in Hamburg, Germany, the 10,000-hours was a constant, about all together, 415 days to get really good at whatever it is. I wonder if we could become friendship masters. If we were willing to invest that much time in our relationships, what might be the payoff? Subhitting the first investors. Five men, one of them a household name and government circle sat in an elegant room in Northern Virginia. We had been talking about shaping forces in our lives, and I asked, so who in your growing up years left fingerprints on your soul in a positive way? To a man they said either their mother or grandmother. My question is, why? I think the answer is quite simple. Time and interest. Mothers and grandmothers by and large take the time to care, to listen, to express affection. Their impact in the early years is enormous. Time and interest allow children to thrive. They know they matter to someone. In reality, every human being has the ability to choose to offer another person time and interest. Little kids sure understand that. They don't have an accurate sense of time, of course. For them, the day after tomorrow might as well be next year. They don't have a clue about the kind of work their parents do. They don't perceive the nuance of relationship or the larger picture of life. The part they understand is love by time spent, love by association. What they want to know is when I see you next, can we play Henry now in a wonderful scholar and mystic wrote the book in the name of Jesus about a unique friendship he formed after his academic career at Harvard and Yale. In those years, he served at Larshay, a home for developmentally disabled adults in Montreal. It was there that Bill befriended him. They would sometimes travel to Henry's speaking engagements together. And on occasion, Bill would be introduced in the epilogue of his book, Now in Related the Time, he took Bill to Washington, DC to make a presentation, quote, together, end quote. Bill's idea of quote, together, end quote, was much more concrete than Henry's. And the audience loved the Winsom Interaction between Bill and Henry. Now in recalled their conversation on the trip back to Canada. Henry, did you like our trip? Oh, yes, I answered. It was a wonderful trip and I'm so glad you came with me. Bill looked at me attentively and then said, and we did it together, didn't we? Then I realized the full truth of Jesus' words were two or three meet in my name, I am among them. Often I had wondered how much of what I had said would be remembered. Now, it dawned on me that most likely much of what I said would not be long remembered. But that Bill and I doing it together would not easily be forgotten. In the name of Jesus is a book on leadership. As now and makes his case for what that leadership should look like, he calls for leaders to practice downward mobility, to walk with others in prayer, trust and vulnerability. That requires a huge investment of time. Lack of time is the curse of our age. By lack, I mean, we unintentionally substitute what we think is important for what is actually important. It happens most clearly with how we structure our children's time. We're trying to do two things with our kids. Protect and prepare. I want to read that again. We are trying to do two things with our kids. Protect and prepare. I think I'll read that a third time. We are trying to do two things with our kids. Protect and prepare. We live in a day when children are kidnapped off streets and seduced on the Internet. Parents want to save their children from those things and also help them compete in the real world. Down time is often seen as wasted. But there are costs to endlessly stacked activities as one high school teacher notes. Seeing things takes time. Seeing yourself takes time. Having a friend takes time. And it takes time to do things well. These kids don't have time. I said earlier that time is the great equalizer because we each have the same amount. It's also the great nurturer. Time is soil from which creativity and innovation sprout. Without enough time and appropriate atmosphere relationships cannot develop their powerful potential. Subheading time invested allows friendships to grow. The question that had been asked at the conference hung like smoke in a still room. How do people get good time together? My response was way too cliche. For when I say, well, quantity of time is not the issue. What we really need is quality. Ruth, my wife, interjected, give me quantity. We'll work out the quality later. Well, there you have it. We simply give time to things we consider important. If it's not on your calendar written down or stamped in your brain, it doesn't exist. Words are cheap. The calendar costs you. I find it fascinating that in the most extraordinary mission in the history of humankind, the redemption and reconciliation of the world, Jesus took so much time to get it done. 33 years. Really? Come on. He's God. He's created the universe, makes water and land, heals folks at the drop of a hat. Everything could have been dialed up in an instant. Instead, we have the whole human experience. Conception, labor, birth, growth, vocation, work, sweat, sadness, joy, injustice, and death. God took the time to do what we do, to feel what we feel, to identify with our suffering. He invested the time to get to know us and let us get to know him. He took the time to become real to us, to be believable. Time invested equals believable. Believable builds friendships. So, when you read the Gospels, it's not just Jesus' singular story. It is Jesus with his parents. It is Jesus with Peter, James, and John. Then Jesus was the 12th. Then there's a group of women, including Susanna, who followed and supported him. The personal interactions you read in the four accounts of his life, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are varied and unique. Of the 49 personal conversations recorded that Jesus had with people, no two are alike. This is no cookie cutter. One size fits all deal. This is designer stuff. His focus models a relationship at its deepest and most real. My friend Mark Batterson said, Jesus spent three years hiking, camping, and fishing. That's a lot of time walking and talking in the open air. That's a lot of time frying fish over campfire. Conversations that happen on dirt roads or hilly trails have their own terrain. Talking like that wanders off into side trails and down alleys. They stop at creeks to dangle feet in bubbling waters and remember boyhood adventures. Conversations at night under the canopy of Orion and the Milky Way elicit deeper and longer thoughts, thoughts that call us to the cosmos and origins, and to questions like, what part do I play in all of this creation? Time spent resting in the shade of a spreading fig tree doesn't distinguish between small talk and big talk or shallow talk and deep talk. It follows the natural contours of life and weaves of fabric so tight that hardly anything can penetrate it. It's about dust and sweat under a hot Palestinian sun punctuated by waiting the shallows of an inland sea with wind gusting in your face and the cry of goals feasting on freshly caught fish. Relationship doesn't get better than that and that kind of relationship takes time. Time is the seed bed for knowing. For Jesus and the disciples it was three years day in a day out where public teachings were the commas in the personal conversations and miracles now and again punctured the mundane. I wonder if the disciples thought when a little girl was raised from the dead or a withered arm was straightened. That's our man. We're with him. They must have. Years later the Apostle John clearly reflected those feelings when he wrote, we saw him. We touched him. We beheld his glory. Unlike most history remembered the memories of Jesus would never outshine the moment they created them. The memories could never be better than the power of his presence as they walked together. When eternity intersected time and the person of Jesus, time suddenly had more meaning. Next time your reflex is you know I just don't have the time or boy that would take a lot of time or I keep running out of time. I would encourage you to pause and rethink the statement or reassess allocation or think about what that really means. One of the things about being my age, my dear friends, it's that Ruth and I know we are on the clock. We have a wail of a lot more time behind us than we had ahead of us. And you know what that does? That makes every single day precious. That's it, but keep talking, I'm going to get modeling. So I'm out. Bless you. Catch you next time. This is Dick Foth with stories to make sense of it all. Saying thanks for listening, thanks for subscribing, thanks for sharing with your friends. What fun. Catch you later.