Good morning and hello friends,
This article is one installment of a multipart series. Be sure to check out my site for previous segments of this series. It will make more sense if you read them in order.
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The first installment contained Chapters 1-3. This one contains Chapters 17-19.
Chapter 17: The Altar of the Clock
(Source: “202 The Altar of the Clock”, integrated with Episode 12 podcast “The Power of the Pause”)
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 would 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.
A Moment in the Workshop
What is on your to-do list right now that feels urgent? Now ask: Is it urgent for God, or urgent for my sense of control? Can you hold your calendar with open hands today, treating each interruption not as a thief, but as a potential envoy of the King?
Chapter 18: The Anchors for Anxious Days
(Source: “174 The Anchors for Anxious Days: Eight Promises to Hold You Steady”)
You know those days that start ordinary, then begin to come apart at the seams at 9 a.m.? That was my week. One thing after another, breaking, sticking, refusing to fit into the day in the way that I expected or anticipated. And on cue, the “tax collector” shows up: frustration, irritation, anger, all elbowing their way to the front, trying to steer my thoughts, my words, my whole posture.
But I caught it. Almost immediately. It was hard, but I forced my finger down on the pause button. Thinking back on the moment it was stunning, really, how fast my heart posture could shift from putting God first to putting my own frazzled flesh first. Just a blink.
Here is the grace: I had been asking God for this. For months, I had whispered, “Help me see these moments coming. Give me a split-second of clarity to pause before I’m in the thick of it, doing things that don’t reflect you.” And He did. On that day, and in the tangled days that followed, these passages were not just verses on a page. They became my shelter. I read them out loud. I turned them over in my mind, asking, “What does this mean for me, right here, right now?”
We have all read these promises before. But they land differently when they are the only raft in the flood. They are not Plan B. I am learning they are the only Plan. When everything else is noise, His Word is the quiet, steady truth I can build my next moment on.
It is also in these moments the clay feels the shaping of the potter most sharply. Understanding what He is doing and choosing to remain steadfast is what we Christians call faith.
One: The “Don’t Worry” Talk
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:25-26 ESV).
Jesus ties our provision directly to our pursuit of His kingdom. The promise is not a life of lazy luxury, but a life where our primary need, relationship with Him, is met, freeing us from the chokehold of worry about the rest.
Two: The “All Needs” Promise
“And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19 ESV).
Paul writes this from prison, not from a palace. He has experienced need, and he is testifying that God meets it. Notice it says needs, not wants. And it is “according to his riches”, the limitless resources of heaven, not according to our limited circumstances.
Three: The Shepherd’s Assurance
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1 ESV).
This is the foundation. If He is your Shepherd, the one who guides, protects, and cares for you, then the result is a soul-deep knowledge that you will lack nothing that He deems necessary for your journey. It is a statement of trust before the provision even appears.
Four: The Good Father
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you… If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7, 11 ESV).
Jesus frames provision within a relational context. We are not begging a distant boss for a favor; we are asking a good, loving Father for what we need.
Five: Provision for Generosity
“And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work” (2 Corinthians 9:8 ESV).
His provision is not just for our comfort; it is to fuel our capacity to be generous to others. He provides so that we can provide.
Six: The Wilderness Testimony
“For the Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing” (Deuteronomy 2:7 ESV).
Look at the setting: a 40-year desert journey. If God can provide for a whole nation in a literal wilderness, He can handle your dry season.
Seven: The Contrast
“The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing” (Psalm 34:10 ESV).
Even the strong and self-sufficient, the “lions”, will come up empty. But those who seek Him, who prioritize the relationship, will find that He withholds no good thing from them.
Eight: The Trust Directive
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6 ESV).
Provision here is framed as guidance and path-clearing. When we trust Him instead of our own frantic plans, He provides the direction and opens the way forward.
These are not decorations for a wall. They are emergency oxygen. Memorize them. Whisper them when the anxiety rises. Let them be the first words your heart reaches for when the old reflexes of fear and control try to take the wheel.
When God is in charge, it always works out in the end, even when we do not see it in the moment.
A Moment in the Workshop
Which of these eight promises do you need most right now? Not all of them. One. The one that speaks to the specific anxiety you are carrying today. Write it on a card. Put it where you will see it first thing tomorrow morning. Let it be the anchor before the storm hits.
Chapter 19: The Pin-Prick and the Permission Slip
(Source: “176 The Pin-Prick & The Permission Slip” and “203 Friday Night with the Father”, merged into a single chapter on the discipline of rest)
It has been a quiet, persistent ache these past few weeks. A spiritual pin-prick. Not a crisis, just a constant, gentle pressure on the soul. I have never observed the Sabbath. Not really. Not with intention. My rest days were just gaps between work, recovery periods, not revolutions.
Then, this subtle conviction. A whisper in the chaos: “You are forgetting something.” It was not guilt. It was a homesick feeling, like I had been ignoring a weekly invitation from someone who loves me.
The more I read, the more I understood. This is not about a day. It is about an identity.
The Sabbath is God’s prescribed antidote to the three great human lies I swallow every week:
“You are what you produce.” (Sabbath says: You are my beloved child.)
“You are in control.” (Sabbath says: I am God; you are not.)
“You must never stop.” (Sabbath says: I built a stop into the very fabric of creation.)
Jesus reframed it in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” He rescued it from being a burden and restored it as a gift.
The ancient practice is a three-fold rhythm: Cease, Rest, Embrace. Cease the work. Rest in active replenishment. Embrace what brings shalom, wholeness, delight, connection.
Friday Night with the Father
The gift arrived unannounced. Not with the ringing of bells, but in the quiet cessation of a habit. A few weeks after that initial pin-prick, I began to observe the Sabbath. I did not approach it as a rule. There was no checklist. I came to it as one accepts a gift from a father’s hand, with open palms, curious to see what was inside.
I had expected rest. What I did not expect was the familiarity of it.
For a season, my youngest daughter and I held Friday nights sacred. Movie night. In the archaeology of parenting, there is a brief stratum where your family is their entire world. We would watch her choice, her kingdom for the evening. We talked through it. We sat in the undemanding glow of the television, present only to the story and to each other. It was not about the film. It was about the undivided attention. The phone was away. The yesterday and tomorrow were forgotten guests. We were, for those hours, fully there.
This, I realized as the first few Sabbaths unfolded, was the texture of the gift. My observance looked like movie night with my Father.
I began to count the minutes toward it as early as Wednesday. A gentle anticipation. What needed doing was done by Friday, not with frantic haste, but with the steady purpose of one preparing for a welcomed guest.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8 ESV). We often hear the “remember” as an obligation. I began to hear it as an invitation to recollection. To re-member myself. To gather the scattered pieces of a week and bring them into wholeness in His presence.
So I sit in stillness. I walk without destination. I read, I write, I pray. I allow myself long, guilt-free stretches of what the world calls boredom, but what I have learned is the fertile ground of the soul. It is in these undefended moments that the replenishment occurs. Not with fanfare, but with the silent subtlety of dawn.
This is not about scheduling time with God. I speak to Him throughout the day every day. The Sabbath is about filtering out everything else. It is about turning off the other screens, the screen of ambition, the screen of anxiety, the screen of endless need. It is coming into the room, closing the door, and letting the story He wants to tell be the only light in the room.
My movie nights with my daughter were a charger for the heart. This weekly observance is a charger for the spirit. It is the same principle of undivided presence, lifted from the temporal to the eternal. It is the “good portion” Mary chose, which will not be taken from her (Luke 10:42).
The gift is not a day off. It is a day with. And in that “with,” I am learning, is the rest that re-members everything.
A Moment in the Workshop
When was the last time you stopped, truly stopped, without guilt? What would it look like this week to carve out even two hours of intentional Sabbath? Choose the day. Prepare for it. Name what you will cease. Name what you will embrace. You have permission. It was given at the foundation of the world. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
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