Something to Start With Article for Winter 2004

Do You Have the Time?

I'm surrounded by calendars. At home our refrigerator is plastered with soccer schedules, weekly school lunch menus and school council meeting dates. We have a calendar at home with the sole purpose of listing extended family birthdays. A school calendar identifies the early dismissal and no school days. We even have a calendar that tells us when the next Schwan day will be.

In my office there are at least five calendars within sight - each reminding me of something different. My United Methodist Program Calendar lists the lectionary readings for the week and identifies the United Methodist Special Sundays. A one page print off tells me what meetings are being held in the Conference Center this week. I have a "page a day calendar" on my window ledge still stuck on June 4th. I have a feeling that since that was the week before Annual Conference it may have been the last time I felt I was anywhere near "keeping up".

And then there is my Palm Pilot. That remarkable little addition to my scheduling life that was supposed to make everything easier, my days more structured, my week better planned out, my year more organized, and my life less hectic.

As a way of practicing accountability, each month after I update my Palm Pilot to reflex what I expect to be doing for the upcoming month - days worked, days off, days in the office, days on the road, I print off a paper copy and share my calendar for the month with Twila Glenn, our Conference Director of Connectional Ministries. A couple months ago, I took my freshly updated, formatted and printed calendar into Twila's office and announced, "Twila, I'm sorry if you can't read this very well. I couldn't figure out how to make the days any bigger, or how to get rid of any events, so I just made the font smaller."

And I realized that's how I live my life. If I can't make the days any longer and if I can't seem to let anything go does that mean that the quality of what I give my family, my job, my faith just gets printed in smaller and smaller font until it's almost unreadable.

Time. How much time do you have? How much time do you need? What do you give your time to? The topic of "Time" is one of several spiritual disciplines addressed in a great resource called, "Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens" - published by Upper Room and available through Cokesbury. It's a great way to get youth and adults talking about how we spend our time, how we use our time and to what do we give or time. If you're looking for a way to talk with youth - or remind yourself - of some of the spiritual disciplines of our tradition this is the place to start.