Who Me? A Prophet??

As If by Magic...

Last Word or First…?

Choose your poison…
or not!

Darkness Giving
Way to Light...?

Time To Say Yes

Of Science, Oatmeal
and Meaning

The Cypress in the Garden:
A Koan Revisited…

Divine Hospitality
at Work...

For the Time Being...
Some Thoughts on the Stewardship of Time

For the Time Being...
Some Thoughts on the Stewardship of Time

by Whitney Wherrett Roberson

Not long ago I attended the Second Annual Conference on Spirituality in the Workplace held in Toronto, Ontario. I’m able to attend one or two of these international spirituality and business conferences a year and this one is probably my favorite since I feel SAW had some small part in inspiring the organization of the first one. Sherry Connally, the guiding light behind the conference, last year and this, attended the first workshop we offered at such an event (in Santa Fe, several years ago.) One of the exercises we did at that workshop was helpful to Sherry as she began to discern her vocation in this area. She went home and began putting the first Toronto conference together! I was delighted to be invited to return for a second year to share our work and do a workshop on initiating spirituality and work conversations.

But a real highlight of the conference for me was not so much doing what I’d planned but a surprise opportunity that came along the day before the conference began. As luck would have it, one of the keynote presentations, months in preparation, fell apart when a key presenter was unexpectedly and unavoidably called out of town. Sherry realized it was much too late to replace the presentation with another keynoter so she asked several of us to present shorter “grace notes.” (Lovely image, isn’t it?) Would I, she asked, give a five-minute “grace note” on the stewardship of time? I was reluctant at first, wondering what I had to say that might be worth hearing. (Secretly I’m thinking: “The stewardship of time?  What on earth do I know about the stewardship of time; if only she knew how frenetic my own life gets...! Somebody else needs to talk about this one so I can listen!”)  But I agreed, and true to its clever name and to the One who no doubt inspired it, my “grace note” (and the experience of preparing it) was, by all reckoning, graceful.

Two things occurred to me as I reflected on the subject. Stewardship of time begins, I think, with the idea of “sabbath.”  Rest. Seems to be a bit out of fashion these days. With the advent of multi-tasking, we don’t even know how to limit ourselves to doing just one thing at a time, let alone doing nothing -- resting-- for Heaven’s sake!  And yet we have a model for sabbath, a divine model, actually; for in my own Judeo-Christian tradition we’re told God Himself rested on the seventh day and commanded that humankind do the same. Now if the Divine commands that we rest, perhaps there’s some meaning here to which we ought to attend!  

The second notion that occurred to me in relation to the stewardship of time has to do with discernment: knowing what’s important. In my grace note, I spoke of my observation that my friends and colleagues -- and I, myself! -- tend to have real difficulty distinguishing between the important and the urgent. Several years ago the SAW organizational team did a little exercise in which we listed all the activities and tasks we’d undertaken. Then we placed each of these activities into one of the four quadrants created when we crossed two continua: more important/less important and urgent/less urgent. What we discovered in this exercise was that we were often neglecting things that were truly important to us because we let ourselves be swamped by the urgent but less important things. How did this sort of confusion happen with such frequency?  Because, I believe, we’d neglected -- you guessed it -- sabbath. I began to see that sabbath is not about doing nothing. It’s about stepping aside so that we can recover our center, about taking time to reflect on what’s important, on what we truly value. Most of us wouldn’t dream of investing large sums of money without careful reflection and planning and yet we often refuse the sabbath reflection and discernment intended to order our investment of time.

Now, of course, I’m not talking about sabbath in the literal, ritual sense. Rather I’m talking about making “sabbath” a regular part of each day or week or month, about finding your own way to honor time as a divine gift intended to be used in the service of your highest and deepest values. As I came to realize, Spirituality at Workis very much about stewardship of time, and stewardship of time is about discovering ways to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy...”