Like many of us who are trying to balance life’s competing responsibilities, Jen Pollock Michel has been a longtime reader of time management books. She thought that time was something to spend or to waste, to make and to manage. As she chronicles in her new book In Good Time, she’s learned that’s not the story of time that the Bible is telling. No, the hours are God’s to give—and ours to receive with gratitude, offer back with praise. As Moses reminds us in Psalm 90, we don’t need to hack time but rather ask God for his wisdom to live our brief lives well. It is a grace to welcome Jen to the farm’s table today…
Guest Post by Jen Pollock Michel
Endurance is the word I meditate on, when I travel to Ohio—last winter—to help my mother and stepfather move into a larger apartment. My stepfather, 88, has come home from a five-day hospital stay, and the compressor of his new oxygen tank, along its snaking cord, are making it difficult to navigate their cramped one-bedroom.
A change is needed—and I am needed to help them make it.
I am generally good in moments like these: when tasks are screaming, when the clock is ticking, when what is needed is furious motion. There is a thrill in getting things done.
On the trip, I take with me an Ecclesiastes commentary my friend has recommended. Living Life Backward by David Gibson proves to be a fitting companion for these long days of sorting and packing and watching my stepfather immobile and downcast in his wheelchair. It’s not hard, during this week, to remember the vanity of human life.
On the one hand, I am productive during my five-day visit. On the other, productivity, as I am learning, is not always a virtue. During this visit, productivity is certainly not the same thing as kindness. Because while I am busy and hard-working, I am also growing increasingly frustrated with my mother for her incapacity to be of meaningful help. A woman overhears my loud irritation at one point when the door to my mother’s apartment stands open. Later, in the elevator, she reminds me my mother is “a very kind lady.”
“It’s what makes waiting almost impossibly hard—because it requires us to believe God is acting even when we are not.“
Productivity is not a solution to this “problem.” I work hard—but I do not fix this situation. My mother is still forgetting things in short spans of time. My stepfather is still physically declining. Even a long visit to the bank doesn’t untangle the complicated financial matters I had hoped to help with.
“Do not be surprised to find yourself in a frustrating situation from which you cannot escape by means of controlling it,” I read in Gibson’s commentary, sitting at the kitchen table one morning. “Not everything can be fixed! Not everything is a problem to be solved. Some things must be borne, must be suffered and endured.”
It is hard, of course, to admit our powerlessness.
It’s what makes waiting almost impossibly hard—because it requires us to believe God is acting even when we are not.
Israel learned the promise of waiting on the shores of the Red Sea—in the moments before God’s wind drove a dry path through the water: “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent” (Exodus 14:13, 14). Israel’s story reminds us that waiting is not always inaction or excuse. Waiting can be a profound act of trust in God’s timing.
“Waiting is a furnace for endurance.“
Nothing, I begin to think, is wasted in waiting. No, this is where faith is put together, limb by limb. Waiting is a furnace for endurance. Waiting may seem unproductive, but it is like the careful cultivation of a vineyard.
Endure isn’t the meaning I had initially seen in the familiar passage, John 15, where Jesus compares himself to a vine, his followers to vine branches. Abide in me, he urges his disciples, according to the ESV and the RSV, two popular translations of the Bible. Remain in me, he says according to the NIV translation, as I also remain in you.
As I read further, arriving at verse 16, I begin to see another meaning beyond abiding as a quiet act of contemplation: “I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide,” (John 15:16). What seems clear here is the sense of fruit enduring and persevering.
Waiting, in other words.
Endurance is a virtue exercised in the time we cannot control or manage. It is mettle formed by heat. Endurance is the capacity to wait and wait out: to remain, rest, persevere, and abide. It is a virtue made necessary in a world that resists repair and restoration.
“Endurance is not the virtue of productivity but of hope.“
Endurance is not the virtue of productivity but of hope.
The Bible assures us that God is waiting, too. “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you” (Isaiah 30:18). This is a promise I find myself clinging to—in the months of grief following my January visit—after my stepfather’s death, my mother’s dementia diagnosis, and our family’s move to be closer to her.
“In a very deep sense,” says Fleming Rutledge, “the entire Christian life in this world is lived in Advent, between the first and second comings of the Lord, in the midst of the tension between things the way they are and things the way they ought to be.” Advent is the in-between time, and what’s needed for waiting, I begin to think, isn’t knowledge—but strength, even strength of hope.
Persevere in me, as I persevere in you. If you endure in me, and my words endure in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
Waiting is one necessary habit of trusting God’s good time.
Have you ever imagined a life without hurry, relentless work, multitasking, or scarcity? A life that is characterized instead by presence, attention, rest, rootedness, fruitfulness, and generosity? In her fifth book, In Good Time: Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace, Jen Pollock Michel invites you to disentangle your priorities from our modern assumptions and instead ground them in God’s time. Then she shows you how to establish 8 life-giving habits that will release you from the false religion of productivity so you can develop a grounded, healthy, life-giving relationship with the clock.
Jen Pollock Michel is an award-winning author and speaker. She holds a B.A. in French from Wheaton College, an M.A. in Literature from Northwestern University, and is working to complete an M.F.A from Seattle Pacific University. You can follow Jen on Twitter and Instagram @jenpmichel and subscribe to her Monday letters at jenpollockmichel.com. Jen lives in Cincinnati with her family. If you’re interested to join Jen’s 4-session rule of life Zoom workshop in January, where a cohort of people will gather to articulate ways to “pattern their lives in faithful response to God’s voice,” you can register here until midnight, December 16. You can learn more about what a rule of life is from Jen’s Substack here and here and here.
[Our humble thanks to Baker Books for their partnership in today’s devotion]
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