Ep 22: Do You Remember the Time?

How does time help us determine the hidden ideas, the desires, and the stories in our hearts?

Time is a fascinating, mysterious, complex indicator.  Not only can we explore how we use and steward our own time, but we should also evaluate how others use time in the formation of our hearts.  

We are creatures who are made for – and long for – intimacy and relationships.  And our longings can only be filled in the context of time, something the modern Christian struggles to embrace. 

In this vulnerable episode, Brian explores how we can take a “time inventory” to help us understand what we truly love and desire. But he also explores, through one of his own childhood experiences, how others use time to form us – for our good or our destruction.  

 

TRANSCRIPTION

Ep 22: Stewarding our Time

(Season 2, ep 9)

Intro: Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: journeying together into deep discipleship. I’m Brian Fisher.

This is Episode 22 – “Do You Remember the Time?”

By now, you’ve probably realized that many of the podcast episode titles are overt or obscure pop culture references – song titles, movie quotes, and things like that. I’d love to tell you there is some hidden meaning behind every title, but I’m not nearly that sophisticated. 

Obviously, Soil and Roots deals with some pretty deep stuff, so I just try to have some fun with the titles.  If you’re picking up on the subtle cultural references, points to you.    

Time

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Time is money.”  The hedonist Oscar Wilde didn’t agree; he said, “Time is a waste of money.”

Pericles said, “Time is the wisest counselor of all.” Lucille Harper quipped, “Time is a great healer, but a poor beautician.”

Stephen Covey: “The key is not in spending time, but in investing it.” Sounds very much like Covey.

Louis E. Boone wrote, “I am definitely going to take a course on time management… just as soon as I can work it into my schedule.”

Douglas Adams joked, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

And the comedic sage Will Rogers wrote, “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

Time – the 7^th of our Heartview Indicators and perhaps the most complex, curious, and mysterious of our eight indicators. 

We have at least some measures of control over our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.  We can take charge of our health to some degree.  We choose who we relate to, and we at least try to control our words.  And here in the West, we can pretty much do what we want with our money – at least the part the government doesn’t take. 

And although we can steward our time to some extent, the flow of time is entirely outside of our control.  We can choose what to think or say, or choose what to buy or not to buy.  But we can’t choose to stop the clock.  We can’t push pause and repeat; we can’t slow it down.  We’re all caught in a steady march of time – and we are entirely incapable of leaving the parade.

It’s both wonderful and a little scary.  There is comfort in knowing that a minute is 60 seconds, and that it will remain 60 seconds until time ends.  There is security in knowing that today is 24 hours.  Tomorrow will also be 24 hours.  Next Thursday will be 24 hours long.

We’re creatures of habit and schedules, even the most Bohemian of us.  You may drive a VW bus and follow the Dave Matthews Band around the country on tour – but you still get up in the morning, eat a few meals a day at regular times, put gas in your bus, and predictably go to sleep every night.  Time is a constant, and it allows us to assess the past, exist in the present, and plan for the future, as best as we can.

There’s also a relentlessness to time.  We can’t ever go back.  We can’t jump ahead to see how things turn out.  We can’t ever be anywhere but right here, right now.  What’s done in the past is truly done, even if we desperately want to change it. 

And we attempt to predict the future – the future of our life, of our jobs, the weather, or the market.  The future of the church, of the world, of our culture.  There are very lucrative careers built on predicting the future. Stock market timers, climatologists, astrologists, end times prophets, and a whole slew of government agencies.  At best, they produce moderately educated guesses. At worst, they mislead and manipulate us.

If you’ve been following the podcast for very long, you have astutely observed that time appears not only as one of the Eight Heartview Indicators, but it’s also the first of the Five Key Elements of spiritual formation.  Time is a really big deal.   So, we’re going to explore it here today, and we’re going to look at it again at the beginning of Season 3, but from a different perspective.

Stewards of Time

The simplest way to talk about time as an indicator of the desires and ideas in our hearts is to remind ourselves of what our mothers told us: you always make time for the things you really want to do.  So how we steward our time reveals whom or what we love.  As I mentioned in a previous episode, if you want to determine which ideas and desires govern you, just inventory your time for a few weeks, and you’ll probably get a good look. 

That’s a pretty obvious, Sunday school way of looking at time as a Heartview indicator.  Chances are, you had a youth group leader or pastor who mentioned that, if we want to grow to be like Jesus, we need to spend time with Jesus. Makes sense.  If you have someone in your life you want to grow to be like, you’d probably want to spend a lot of time with that person, so you can learn to love what they love, learn how they think, why they react the way they do, how they relate to people, and so on.  As some educators say, more is caught than taught.  We learn to be like someone by being in their presence, and that requires time. 

Keep in mind, it’s only been in the last few hundred years that we have been able to have these conversations about all of our discretionary time.  For most of human history, few people had the chance to take long vacations, invest time in their hobbies, or watch sports on Sunday.  Most of their time was spent making a living, harvesting or hunting for food, taking care of their simple homes, and raising many children. 

Then there are the guilt-inducing studies that show how much time we spend on spiritual or religious activities.  Christianity Today reports the average American spends 9 minutes per day on spiritual habits.[1]   

The website Patheos calculated that the average practicing Christian may spend 4 hours a week on religious activities.  That’s an average of around 50 minutes per day.  Sounds about right if we attend church for 90 minutes per week, have a bible study on a weekday or attend a small group, and have daily devotions and prayer time.[2]

But as Bob Robinson at Patheos points out, for the Christian, there is no such thing as the secular or the sacred. There’s only sacred. How do we measure “religious” or “spiritual” time?  Is eating a meal somehow less sacred than our prayer time if all time belongs to God?  Is resting or enjoying a hobby somehow less spiritual than singing hymns and worship songs at church?  If our entire lives are to be an expression of worship – of love and devotion – to God, why would we segment our time into spiritual and non-spiritual? That’s probably a debate for another time.    

I love my wife, Jessica.  I also like her. We intentionally spend a fair amount of time together – not because it’s a ritual or a chore – but because we genuinely like each other’s company and enjoy growing closer. The Westminster Confession says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and what? Enjoy Him forever.  Can we enjoy God by eating a meal or watching a ballgame?  Sure. Those are good gifts from God. 

Still, if we spend 30 hours a week watching sports but only 2 minutes a day reading our Bible and praying, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that we aren’t getting to know Jesus any better.  This is just common sense.  Time is a requirement for any relationship.  And if you love someone, you want to spend time with them. Not because you have to, but because it’s a joy to be with them. 

So yes, we can learn a lot about what we love and about the ideas that drive us by inventorying our time.  People who work crazy hours (and not because they really have to) desire things that work gives them, and these desires are tied to their ideas, typically their ideas of identity and value.  They derive their identity from work. They derive their value from work.

But that’s very different from a single mom who works crazy hours out of necessity, to put food on her table and provide for her family.  And working 2-3 jobs is the only way she can make ends meet. 

This is where inventorying our time as a standalone exercise isn’t perfect.  A husband who works 70 hours a week because it gives him a sense of false value and identity (and perhaps he doesn’t want to be home with his family) is very different from a single mom who works 70 hours a week and would much rather be at home with her kids.

So, in general, it’s a good exercise to evaluate how we steward our time, and it does provide some insight into what or whom we truly love, no question.  Particularly regarding our discretionary time: how we spend it and with whom points us to the ideas in our hearts, especially those core ideas of identity, anthropology, value, power, purpose, and love.   

But for those of us who are performance-based, we need to be careful with these types of exercises.  There is a time for everything – there are seasons.  Sometimes you may be heavily engaged in serving, and other times you may be resting.  That’s okay.  And, candidly, having a family meal can be just as holy as serving at church if our hearts are bent in that direction.  We can get pretty legalistic about time.  Yes, we are stewards of our time, but if everything is sacred (including those things we don’t normally associate with “spiritual activities”), that should broaden our perspective.

Conversely, if someone is genuinely lazy – they spend most of their time on selfish pursuits and only things that please them – that’s a problem.  For example, Paul had some very blunt things to say about people who don’t use their time to provide for their households.  Perhaps it’s not just how we steward our time, but the desires and motivations that govern how we use our time. 

But I think there are some deeper things to explore related to time as an indicator of our hearts, in addition to taking a time inventory.  We need to explore how other people around us – formative people – impact our spiritual formation through the time we spend with them.    

Molded through Time

I grew up in Pennsylvania, and when I was seven years old, my folks figured out I had a particular talent for playing the piano.  We were referred to an older gentleman well-known in the community for his music studio, so I started taking lessons from him. He was a priest at the local VA hospital, taught 50 or so kids, hosted regular recitals, and developed a performance-based approach to teaching that strongly appealed to my competitive nature. He had awards, ribbons, and medals. Students could basically “level up” through competitions and meeting certain goals.  I was hooked in about five minutes.

This priest became the second most influential, most formative person in my early life, next to my parents. That’s because I spent a lot of time with him from age 8 to around 13 or 14.  Just a few years after starting piano, I became his teaching apprentice and also worked in his studio, which was in the basement of his house. 

As time went on, he invited me to do things that weren’t piano-related. Miniature golf, taking day trips to various places, and I stayed overnight at his home once in a while.  Both of my grandfathers died when I was an infant, so he became a grandfather-type figure.

I’m a lifelong Protestant, but my teacher hired me to be the organist for Saturday mass at the VA hospital, so I worked there for him for a few years.  It seemed to be a close relationship… so close, in fact, that when I was 12 or 13, he told me he had put me in his will.  Even at that age, I thought that was a bit of a strange thing to say, but I was honored.

When I was in grade school, I was unnaturally short. I appeared younger than I was. Looking back at the pictures, it seems I was a pretty cute kid. I was funny, personable, and affable.  People seemed to like me, and I liked most people.  Being a good pianist didn’t hurt – it helped me become more popular than I probably would have been otherwise.

I devoured most of the piano pieces my teacher assigned, and quickly rose to be the top student in the studio. Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Handel, Gershwin.  At studio recitals, I was usually the last person to perform, and that was the place of honor – that meant you were the most advanced student. 

As I grew older and into high school, my relationship with my teacher changed, as many relationships do. I discovered girls and got involved in other activities.  I still took lessons and worked for him most of the time until I graduated, but the relationship became more formal.  I left for college, met my wife, and got married.  I visited him a few times in the interim, but he passed away a few years after my college graduation. 

I may have fallen out of his favor because that call from his lawyer about his will never came. 

Jess and I had our boys, and life moved on.  But when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, I began to question some things about my relationship with my piano teacher.  I couldn’t put my finger on it – but something about it felt…odd, particularly in those early years when I was the short, cute kid who looked younger than I was. 

It bothered me that my mentor took me under his wing, was such a formative figure in my life (not just musically but in other areas), and we grew apart so quickly. Had I done something wrong?

Being a parent changes your perspective on a lot of things.  As my boys grew up, I began to evaluate my relationship with my mentor in light of what I looked for as a parent.

As I entered my 40s, I realized what bothered me about my early relationship with my teacher was how often…he physically touched me.  My shoulders, my face, my arms, my hands. 

He claimed he had some medical knowledge, so he would massage my face to supposedly help with allergies or massage my back to loosen up my muscles.  He would find reasons to sit me on his lap or between his legs.  He was an overweight man, and for some reason, one of the most powerful images in my mind about him was his fingers.  They were swollen – almost mushy. 

My recollection is that when I was with him, there was usually some sort of physical contact.  I began to wonder: Was he a kindly grandfather figure, or was it something else? When he took me alone on outings or invited me to stay overnight at his house, was it entirely innocent? Either way, the older I got, the odder the whole relationship seemed.  

In 2018, almost 20 years after my piano teacher died, there was a massive investigative report released on Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, and it was uncovered that some 600 clergy statewide were accused of credible child sexual assault.  Sure enough, my piano teacher made the list.  His diocese wrote this in their report regarding the accused priests:

“Every person named on this list was credibly accused of actions that, in the diocese’s judgment, disqualify that person from working with children.  Such actions could include the use of child pornography, furnishing pornography to minors, corruption of minors, violating a child-protection policy, failure to prevent abuse that they knew to be happening, and — in some cases — direct physical sexual abuse or sexual assault of minors.  Allegations were corroborated by secular legal proceedings, canon law proceedings, self-admission by the individual, or threshold evidence (as defined in the Child Protection Policy).  None of the priests listed are permitted to engage in any form of public ministry or to present themselves publicly as priests.”[3]

I don’t know all that much about child sex abuse.  But after I read the report, I searched for information on how these relationships develop, and I found information on sexual abuse “grooming.” You probably already know this, but there is a fairly defined process of how sexual predators cultivate their victims.

The first four stages of sexual abuse grooming are: targeting the victim, gaining trust, filling a need, and isolating the child. 

Boy, that sounded familiar. I was a small, gifted, naïve boy, an easy target.  He was a respected, talented piano teacher with a professional studio and a religious leader in the community.  He was someone to be trusted. I had no grandfathers or older mentors – he certainly filled that need.  And he regularly put me in situations where he and I were alone. 

Had the second most formative person of my childhood been grooming me?  Was the way he physically touched me just the kind gestures of an old man, or was he seeing how much he could get away with?  And did he lose interest in me when it became evident that I was interested in girls and was growing into a young man?  The awards, the compliments, the comment that I was in his will…were they genuine signs of affection or manipulations?

The fact that, even after his death, he was accused and condemned by his diocese based on whatever evidence they collected seems to suggest an answer.  I ran across one male commenter online who had also been his student and who had experienced the same behavior, even the same trips and outings.

No Simple Answer

I suppose some of you think I’m reading too much into it. Maybe he was a little creepy, but we live in such sensitive times now that even innocent behavior may appear manipulative.

Others of you are listening and vigorously nodding.  There’s no question in your mind that I was exploited.  You have either lived it yourself or have a deep understanding of grooming, and you recognize the signs. 

Either way, the fact is that the second most formative person in my young life was accused and convicted of child sexual abuse and was posthumously thrown out of ministry.  And I spent many, many hours in his presence.

My point is, it’s one thing to evaluate how we steward our time. It’s another to assess carefully and critically the motivations of those who spend time with us. As human beings, we MUST recognize that our hearts are formed through the time we spend in relationships with other humans. 

Relational Formation

And that relational formation can be far more powerful than sermons, prayer times, and Bible studies.  

Note, I said, “can be.” I’m not taking away from the power of prayer, Scripture, or preaching.  The Holy Spirit is constantly healing and redeeming.  But as Christians who desire to dig deep into our hearts, we can’t do that without evaluating those people in our lives who have formed us – and generally, that means those people with whom we have spent a lot of time. Or, unfortunately, in the cases of many children, the time not spent with them by people who should have helped form them. 

Did my relationship with my childhood mentor impact my spiritual formation, the formation of my heart? Yes.

Was some of it positive? I hope so. 

Was some of it negative?  The older I get, the more I have to concede that, yes, there remain some dark ideas in my heart as a result of that relationship.  All ideas from the kingdom of darkness are designed to hurt and kill us, and I certainly haven’t been immune to that pain. 

I could give you several examples, but one of them is my relationship with the piano today.  After high school, I went on to major in music in college. I was a full-time, broke musician for a few years after that.  I served as a church musician for decades. Music has long been a central part of my life.

But as I got older and my heart wrestled with the nature of my relationship with my teacher, my joy for the piano waned.  A few years ago, I stopped playing in church altogether. 

I have a piano in my home and still play it occasionally, but to be honest, I don’t have the desire most days. I think my heart is still grappling with this: a gift that God gave me to express joy and freedom and beauty may have been cultivated by someone who wasn’t seeking my goodness, he may have been seeking something else.  And so, part of me feels used, maybe even corrupted. 

It’s been decades since all of this happened, so you may be wondering why I just can’t get over it.  I wonder the same thing. Maybe I just don’t have the faith. Maybe I don’t pray enough. I don’t know. 

I’d love to feel the joy of playing music and expressing God’s goodness through the piano like I did when I was a kid.  I’d love to sit down and play with other musicians.  It’s a thrilling, amazing experience when great musicians make great music. There’s nothing like it.

And I have a hope that one day I will.  It’s just not today. 

Formation Takes Time

Look, in our version of modern Christianity, we expect instant everything.  Instant healing, instant wisdom, instant reconciliation, instant sanctification.  It seems the only people in our society who understand that the heart may take years (sometimes decades) to heal and recover are the addicts who are courageous enough to go public with their addiction. 

I recently heard a discipleship expert say that the best discipleship model he’s ever seen is AA. He’s right.  Time, habit, intimacy, community, and instruction.  Think about it.

The problem is we’re all addicted to something.  Most of us just don’t know it.  The modern church certainly doesn’t seem to know it. 

Certainly, there’s a sadness to this part of my story.  Whether I was a victim or not, there are enough lingering questions that I find deeply troubling. Most of those questions don’t have answers.  

This part of me resonates with Ecclesiastes 2 – “it is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting.  For this is the end of every man, and the living takes it to heart.”

With all the surface promises our culture makes about wealth, happiness, instant gratification, success, freedom from pain, and all the things we’ve been unconsciously trained to think we deserve, we are missing some very critical elements of what it means to be human.

We mourn.  We suffer. We experience pain.  We are so trained in the unconscious idea that we deserve to be free from suffering that we are missing the point – Jesus suffered.  We suffer. And though He certainly heals and redeems and reconciles and restores – often that process takes a very, very long time.  And He usually accomplishes that process not through some ecstatic emotional experience, but with people. Through community.  And yes, through time…with the right people.   

So yes, this part of my story is sad.  There are parts of your story that are very sad.  But there is something important underneath the sadness. Hope. 

In modern Christianity, we tend to project that hope onto eternity, and that’s fine.  But that hope doesn’t just exist in the infinite future – it exists right now.  And in the kingdom of light, we have the honor and the privilege and the joy of being that hope to each other. And hope is very often manifested in time.

Is there someone in your orbit right now who could use your time?  Not your advice, not your words, not your Christian pleasantries.  But you.  Your presence.  Your time.  You – as the manifestation of hope. 

Or perhaps you need someone to be hopeful for you.  Someone to sit with you. To go shopping with.  To watch a game with.  To just visit with. And not just once.  Not just in the week following a crisis. But next week, and the week after, and the week after.  And next year, and the year after that.

How are we using our time?  And how have others used their time in our lives?  Are we so busy with work, family, and church that we don’t have time to give? 

Dark ideas in the heart are pernicious things, folks.  They eat at us, they gnaw at us, they wear us down.  Ideas of light are the opposite. They feed us, nourish us, energize us, and give us life. 

And often our hearts embrace these ideas of light through the consistent, gentle, very present gift of someone else’s time.

Thanks for listening!  If you enjoy the podcast, please share it with your friends and family and give it a great rating on your favorite podcast platform.  For more information, just visit us at soilandroots.org, and drop us an email at fish@soilandroots.org.  We’ll see you next time. 

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[1] https://www.preachingtoday.com/illustrations/2010/september/5090610.html

[2] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/reintegrate/2021/04/30/168-hours-how-much-of-it-do-you-devote-to-god/

[3] https://www.eriercd.org/childprotection/disclosure.html