Buying The Time Back

She did the arithmetic once, on paper, in February, because she wanted to prove something to herself.

Twelve hours of work with the commute in it. Seven of sleep, on a good night, which is not most nights. That leaves five. Out of the five comes her mother's medication and her mother's appointments and the phone calls about her mother that nobody else in the family makes. Out of the five comes the boy's homework and the girl's asthma and a house that does not clean itself and food that does not appear.

Five hours, and she counted twenty-two things that live in them.

She wrote it all out and then she sat and looked at the page, and the thing she felt was not self-pity. It was something closer to vindication, which passed in about a minute and left nothing useful behind.

Because they keep saying it. Make time. You have to make time for God. It gets said kindly by people who love her and it gets said from platforms by people who do not know her, and every single time it lands the same way, which is as a bill she cannot pay.

Make it out of what.

If somebody said that to you this month, come and sit down for a minute. Nobody here is going to hand you an item twenty-three.

Paul does not say make it

Here is the verse that sits underneath most of the advice she has been given, and the advice has been drifting away from the verse for a long time.

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.Ephesians 5:15 and 16

Redeeming the time. That is the phrase, and the word underneath it is a commercial one. It means to buy back, to take something that is already out there in circulation and bring it into your own hands.

Not manufacture. Not create out of nothing. Buy back.

And that is a completely different instruction, because you cannot buy back what you do not already have. The whole verb assumes the time exists and is already occupied. Paul is not addressing people with empty afternoons. He is writing into a hard century to people whose days were full of work and danger, and he tells them to go and repurchase what is already theirs.

She does not need to find a twenty-third hour. She has been asked to reach into the twenty-two things she already does and take some of it back.

You are not being asked to produce time out of nothing, and you never were, in the verse itself. Ephesians 5:16 is where that sits, in a verb that means to buy out of the market, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to choose a merchant's word rather than a maker's is the one who lifts an impossible bill off a woman in February.

What buying it back actually looks like in twenty-two things

Let me be concrete, because a nice distinction that stays in the abstract is just a cleverer way of failing her.

She stands at a sink most nights. That is real time, and it is already hers, and at the moment it is occupied by whatever is playing or by the running list of tomorrow. That time can be bought back without one thing coming off the list.

She drives her mother to appointments. There is a stretch of that drive, after the drop off, alone in the car, that is currently spent on nothing at all.

She waits outside the boy's practice. She waits at the pharmacy. She lies awake at ten past three, which she has done for two years and which she has always treated as lost.

None of that is an empty hour. Every bit of it is occupied. And every bit of it can be repurchased, and the price is attention rather than minutes, and attention is a currency she actually holds.

You have hours already in your hands, and they are already yours, and the only thing being asked is what goes into them. He promised it, in the words about doing whatever you do heartily as to the Lord (Colossians 3:23), which is addressed to people at work rather than people at leisure, and His Spirit does not need an empty afternoon in order to be met.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go further, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is never going to be one here.

And I want to say something particular to a woman running on five hours. Nothing on this page is going to suggest that you take anything more off your body. You are already carrying a great deal, and going without is not on the table as advice from me under any circumstances.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this article, and you were never on the outside of it because of what your week costs you. That is 2 Corinthians 8:12, not my sympathy, and His Spirit has never once been distributed according to anybody's available margin.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.