Our impatience with waiting—and our demand for efficiency—betray our mistaken beliefs about time. We think that time is a commodity, something to be spent and wasted and saved. But a Christian perspective on time begs us to see that time is first and foremost a gift, given to us by our Creator God.

From God’s good and generous hands we are given every moment called now.

As the Apostle James reminds in his letter, we’re not in control of time, not even able to reliably plan for tomorrow. “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time then vanishes,” (James 4:13, 14).

We learned this truth, of course, during our earliest pandemic days when normal life was overturned by the global crisis. Graduations were cancelled, weddings were postponed. Days blurred one into another, and tragically, people grew sick and died, reminding us that tomorrow is never a guarantee.

Where do we find hope in the midst of these sobering truths about time? James gives us a simple and yet profound answer. He says that God’s people must live in surrendered trust to his will—and his good time. Instead of presuming on tomorrow or next month or next year, we ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that,” (v. 15). This isn’t to say that planning is wrong, but it is to say that counting on time is a presumption we can’t exercise. It is to say that alone we must learn the ancient monastic wisdom of remembering that we die.

Living in time requires gratitude: for every gift of every new day. And it also requires humility: to recognize that only God can make sure and certain plans. This gives us a freedom to believe that our time is a gift received from God and rendered back to him in worship.

We won’t get everything done that we hope and plan, but that’s okay. Because God’s never in a hurry—and never out of time.