202 The Altar of the Clock

How I traded one idol for another and the quiet lesson that set me free.

Feb 04, 2026

It was a quiet Tuesday morning when the light broke through. I was on my knees, not in prayer, but with a wrench in my hand, beneath the sink. The pipe had burst two days prior. Water everywhere. A contractor’s quote sat on the counter, a number with three zeros after it. My first thought, my ingrained reflex, was to calculate. The hours this repair would take me versus the hours I could bill for my work. The old math clicked into place. It was, on paper, a waste of my time.

The revelation did not come as a voice. It came as a stillness, a knowing that settled in the space between my racing thoughts. A simple, unadorned truth. I had dethroned one idol only to kneel before another. I had carefully, prayerfully, dismantled the altar where my business had sat. I had offered it up, stone by stone. I thought the temple of my heart was clean. But there, in the shadow of the broken pipe, I saw the new shrine. It was small. It was sleek. It bore no graven image. It was a clock.

For years, I had understood idolatry as the big, obvious statues. The pursuit of wealth, the lust for status, the pride of life. I had wrestled those giants. But this was different. This was not the worship of a thing made, but of a dimension given. I had made a god of time itself.

My journey with this idol began, as most false worship does, with a good intention. As a young man with three children by twenty-three, time was a currency I had to spend wisely. If the Honda needed brakes, I spent a Saturday morning doing it myself. The parts cost a few hours of my wage. Paying a professional would cost a day or more. This was stewardship. This was provision. It was good.

But as the years passed, the equation shifted. My hourly worth in the marketplace increased. The math began to whisper a new doctrine. Time is money. Your time is precious. Protect it. Optimize it. Leverage it. I listened. I began to protect my hours with a vigilant, almost furious, diligence. I saw unscheduled obligations as theft. I was offended when others presumed upon my calendar. I had confused stewardship with ownership. I had begun to believe the time was mine.

The world affirmed this. It calls it being a good capitalist, a wise manager. It does not call it what it is. Idolatry. The immoderate attachment, the devotion, to those sixty-minute increments. I was not worshipping a physical object, but I was bowing to a principle. I was offering my trust to the clock, my fear to the calendar, my devotion to efficiency.

Jesus asked a question that now feels personally surgical. “Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” My anxiety over time the squeezing of tasks, the resentment of interruptions, the frustration with delays was a form of prayer to this new god. I was pleading with Chronos for what only Kairos, God’s appointed time, could give. I was seeking from the created resource what can only come from the Creator’s hand.

The shift began when the repairs stacked up. The HVAC unit failed. The quote: one thousand dollars. The bathroom flood. The quote: five thousand. The garage door, the car transmission. Each time, the old math screamed. Your time is too valuable for this. Pay the expert. Go do what you do best.

But a strange pattern emerged. The money for the parts would appear, a surprise check, a saved surplus, a long overdue invoice, a provision undeniable. Yet the money for the labor never did. The funds were there for the new compressor, the drywall, the sealant. But never for the man to install it. I’d pray, “Lord, provide for this repair.” And He would. With a pallet of materials on my driveway and a clear weekend on my calendar.

I saw it first as a logistical puzzle. Then, as a lesson in self-reliance. Finally, in that quiet Tuesday morning, as the diagnosis. He was providing the what. But He was commanding the who. He was assigning the hours. The labor was not a line item to be outsourced. It was the point. The time was not mine to broker. It was His to allocate.

God was not evaluating my hours on a balance sheet of billable rates. He was reading them on a scroll of obedience. Was I in harmony with His will in this moment? That was the only metric. The question changed from “Is this the most profitable use of my time?” to “Is this the task You have set before me now?”

This is where the idolatry of time grows subtle. We often see it in the anxiety of the busy, the pride of the productive. But it also wears the face of its opposite. We can idolize time by frantically killing it. We can fritter it away on emptiness, on scrolling, on distraction, as a refuge from the pressure of its passage. This, too, is a form of devotion. It is offering our most non-renewable resource to the altar of numbness. It is choosing the temporary relief of escape over the eternal presence of the Comforter.

The story of Martha and Mary lays it bare. Martha was not wrong for serving. She was distracted, “anxious and troubled about many things.” Her service had become enslaved to the tyranny of the task list, the pressure of the schedule. Mary chose the “good portion.” She sat. In a culture that venerates motion, sitting is a radical act of defiance against the idol of time. She chose presence over productivity. And Jesus said her choice would not be taken from her. The fruits of hurried service perish. The fruit of sitting at His feet endures.

My repair projects became my sitting place. The hours under the car, the days patching the drywall, were not a diversion from my purpose. They were my purpose in those moments. In the monotony of measuring twice and cutting once, in the sore muscles and the greasy hands, the chatter of the marketplace faded. The silent, patient voice of the Father grew clearer. He was not just fixing my house. He was repairing my sight.

I began to see the idol for what it was. A belief that my value is tied to my output. A fear that an unmonetized hour is a lost hour. A trust in my own ability to manage, control, and optimize my days. A devotion to the clock that overshadowed my devotion to the Clockmaker.

The biblical call is not to idleness, but to surrendered stewardship. “Redeem the time,” Paul writes. To redeem is to buy back, to liberate from a useless state for a holy purpose. We are to liberate our hours from the tyranny of self-importance and anxiety and place them under the lordship of Christ. This means holding our schedules with open hands. It means seeing an interruption not as a thief, but as a potential envoy of God. It means understanding that a “wasted” afternoon listening to a hurting friend may be the most sacred investment we make.

I had to repent. Not for fixing my sink, but for believing my time doing it was somehow beneath me. Not for having a career, but for believing my professional hours were inherently more sacred than my domestic ones. Not for planning, but for trusting my plan more than His providence.

The remedy is not a better planner. It is a transferred trust. It is believing, down in the marrow, that my times are in His hands. That He appoints my boundaries and my burdens. That a life submitted to His daily bread, His provision of task, energy, and opportunity is a life of profound and hidden peace.

The world will call it inefficient. It will say you are wasting your potential. It will urge you to monetize every minute. Do not listen. Your potential is not measured in revenue, but in resonance with the will of God. Your most “productive” day may be the one where you accomplished nothing the world would tally, but you wept with someone who mourned, prayed for a stranger, or simply waited on the Lord in silence.

There is no such thing as your time. There is only time, a loan from eternity, granted by the Father, to be spent in fellowship with Him and in love for His children. Whether that spending looks like crafting a sermon or crafting a cabinet, leading a meeting or leading a child in prayer, is His decision to make. Our part is the offering.

So I laid down more than just the wrench that Tuesday. I laid down the claim. I acknowledged the true Owner of the hours. The anxiety lifted, not because the work was done, but because the Worker was recognized. It was no longer my time to protect, but His time to direct. And in that surrender, I found a freedom no efficiency app could ever provide. I found that when time is no longer your god, you are finally free to live in it as a child. A child who knows the day, and every minute in it, is safely in His Father’s hands.

That is all, and thank you for reading.