Maybe it’s time for you to rethink how you process time. Your life is rapidly compressing and squeezing out every remaining moment of free time. In the end, this squeezing can leave you empty of real substance and filled only with the demands produced by your unhealthy schedule. The is something more to discover.

A clock in the clock tower in Salisbury, England contains what is considered to be the oldest continuously working clock in the world. It dates back to 1386. It doesn’t look like our modern idea of a clock. It is a large and simple machine. It has no face to display, second, minute or hour hands. It was only created to make a loud sound on each passing hour. People living in 1386 were only interested in knowing the hour passage since their lives were not so micro-managed as our lives are today. When this clock sounds on the hour it makes a loud racket, so loud the people in town and distant farmers could hear its announcement. In between the hourly sounding, people went about life not dominated by the concern created by a passing second not assigned to some task.

In the middle of our ever-increasing busyness and obsession to fill every moment of our lives with a slavish assignment to produce, God is processing the passage of our time in a very different way. His “clock” is more like the clock in Salisbury. He is not another pressure producing presence that demands all our seconds are occupied with something. He is the God of the moment. The God of the quiet stroll, a welcomed pause, a soft breeze gently passing over our face reminding us that we don’t have to be run by a clock, only the impulse of the Spirit.

When our clock of life becomes more like the clock in Salisbury, we can slow down and take a breath and actually smell a rose. God does make announcements when He needs to, but they are rare and not needed if you have learned how to live in the moment.  Instead of a continual stream of nervous alarms, He is the God of peace and tranquility – that is how He processes our passage of time. 

Maybe it is time for each of us to remove the emotional minute and second hands from the clock of our lives and simply chill out. If we don’t, the culture will set our life-clock and have us so occupied with the unrelenting task of keeping a schedule that we will no longer hear God’s voice, only the sound of another alarm.