The God of Quality Time

I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this big story of brokenness and redemption—in a small, gray, stir-crazy Tuesday morning.

God, the Creator of all things, the One who knows us better than anyone else and yet loves us more than anyone else, invites us to this friendship. Sharing time with God should never be seen as a duty: it’s a get to, not a have to; a may, not a must.1

To see the Storyteller we need to slow down our interior life and watch. We need to be imbedded in the Word to experience the Storyteller’s mind and pick up the cadence of his voice. We need to be alert for the story, for the Storyteller’s voice speaking into the details of our lives. The story God weaves is neither weird nor floaty. It always invo

engage the mind and the heart and discern the presence of God in the here and now. The connection between the two creates a current of awareness that helps move our focus away from our own wants and desires to the wants and desires of God: that we stay awake, listen, serve, and love our neighbors in their suffering and in spite of our own.

This is why the temporal question—“What time is it?”—is a necessarily prelude to the discipleship question—“What do we do now?” And the resources for answering that question are ancient.

Discernment isn’t so much about finding more time (chronos; quantity). It’s more about stewarding the time (kairos; quality) more faithfully.