I’ve found that the middle of most of my days race by with endless details, meetings, faces, and tasks in a blur. To date, all my resolutions to carve out time to actually read or reflect or pray anything longer than ‘God, help!’ have failed. My apparently clean desk is a studied sham. Behind it on the floor, beside it near the radiator, and across the room in the closet are piles of paper that mark my real failure to deal with what arrives daily by post, by email, and or congregational courier.
One of my pastoral heroes, when he was my age, scheduled appointments with the likes of Tolstoy and Melville and Milton. Without shirking his duties to preach and pray and spend time with people, he managed through these weekly appointments he worked his way through hundreds of years of great literature. And when ecclesiastical salesmen or urgent trivia pressed in, demanding a meeting, he would apologize and say he already had an appointment at 9 a.m. on Thursday. Since it is not polite to ask a pastor with whom he is meeting at 9 a.m. on Thursday, he never needed to explain that his 9 a.m. was with Fyodor Dostoevsky or John Donne or Flannery O’Connor.
I have nearly all their books on the shelf near my desk as a distinguished backdrop for my frantic paperwork and backlog of meetings, but in fifteen years not one of those authors has received a standing appointment in my week. My ever more sophisticated technology for time management has merely moderated the urgent.
The exception has been people. I have made time for people and that I wouldn’t change. Where two or three are gathered, God does show up and for a moment the blur of triage and management comes into focus around one fearfully and wonderfully made. I love that.
Yet now I wonder if I haven’t even shortchanged them by failing to also carving out time for King David and Saint Paul. And not just David and Paul, but also Shakespeare and MFK Fisher and John McPhee.
