I’ve been pondering a deep thought this week. I’ve been reading John Caputo’s book “Hope against Hope” and in it he shares that there are two kinds of time in our world. There’s “conditional” time and “unconditional” time. The way I like to think of conditional time is that it’s “counting” time. Most of us live in this time most of the time. I call “conditional time” “Counting Time”. It’s that time when we are trying to cram as much into our day as we can. It’s that time when we are counting the minutes each of these tasks takes. It’s that part of our planner that has all of our schedules and lists. It’s that part of our address books that has stars next to those people with the most “capital” and “power”… the people that we need to know in order to get more of what we want. I spend a lot of time in this “counting” space.
The other kind of time is free! There is no counting here! There is no “quid pro quo”. I call this time “grace” or “gift” time. It’s a place where you give a gift to someone, not so you get a thank you, or not because you want something from them, but you give it just because it’s cool to give someone a gift. Most of us don’t spend much time in this “gift or unconditional time”. We maybe have a few moments, but they are fleeting. “Counting time” tends to dominate.
When I think of these two kinds of time, I remember a time when our annual conference was very concerned about the health of our pastors. In honesty, they were more concerned about how much health care costs. They wanted us to be healthy because it would save them money. And so, they took us all on a health information tour. And when we all got done, we were all required to wear a step counter on our ankle.
Now, listen! I’m all for being healthy, but I’m also a little bit paranoid about “big brother watching me”. Let’s put it this way: I have a healthy skepticism of corporate requirements. And an ankle bracelet that was required of us to wear? I felt like I was in the middle of the novel 1984!
At first, I tried to embrace this thing. They wanted us to walk 10,000 steps a day. And at first, I tried! I really did! But after a while I got so obsessed with “counting” my steps that I started hating my walks! Even when I tried “not” to watch my step counter, I would literally stop every 3 blocks and check it! And then when I didn’t make my goal…the email reminders about it were devastating! I felt like such a failure! In fact, a couple of days I actually put the step counter on my dog, just so I could make my goal!
One Autumn day, while I was walking on one of the bike paths in our town, I had had enough. I was walking over a bridge, and I suddenly stopped. There was an annoying beeping going on. Where was it coming from? I looked down and realized it was my step counter. This was just too much. And it was then that I stopped and decided to do something radical. In fact, I thought it was so radical that it might even get me fired! Now that excited me! So, I reached down, unfastened my ankle monitor, and threw it into the creek! And as I did, I let out a primordial scream of pure joy.
As I look back at that moment, I realize that I’m a little overdramatic sometimes! I also realize that throwing away my “counting” device, however liberating, wasn’t a very good solution to my problem. You can’t just stop living in the “counting time” world! Let’s face it, not many of us can just stop and go live off the grid or join a monastery! That’s just not how the world works!
John Caputo shares that the key to living in today’s world is not an either-or approach. The key is to try to live “in-between” these two senses of time.
“Instead of choosing between the conditional and the unconditional, it is a matter of living between them. The mark of the human is to live in the distance between the conditional the unconditional, to constantly negotiate between them. For me religion means living in constant exposer to the unconditional, open to something excessive, exceptional, unforeseeable, unprogrammable, something slightly mad relative to the rationality of means-and-end thinking. To lack the religion of which I speak is to allow the series of conditions to surround and submerge us. We would see no farther than our noses, have a nose only for a good investment, for making a profit, so that our lives would be consumed by consuming, swallowed up by winning, where everything has a price.”
This makes me realize how important worship is, and prayer. In our counting time world, praying (opening ourselves up to something greater than our physical world), and worship (letting go of our “counting time” mindset and embracing a God and world that is unconditional and free—God’s grace) seem ridiculous and even “stupid”. But to those of us who have begun to realize that there is something “more” to this world than “counting”, worship and prayer are vital keys to learning to live life with a capital L. Abundant life, then, is about living with this tension between the two kinds of time and learning to embrace more and more moments of “gift time”.
Your friend and pastor, learning that maybe it’s better to take that step counter off sometimes instead of throwing it out, Brook