My wife and I stopped at our Internet provider to change our service package. We have finally succumbed to the lure of broadband. While we sat off to the side filling out paperwork, a UPS driver bustled in the room with a large package. He set it on the floor with a thud and bounded over to the receptionist for her signature. As she signed the electronic device, I noted he took out his key ring in his left hand and got the key ready for when he returned to his brown truck.
“They teach him to have his key ready like that,” I thought later. If he saves only three seconds by not fumbling for his key when he gets back to his truck, after 100 stops he will have gained five minutes. UPS drivers make hundreds of deliveries each day, and their training must teach them not to waste a second of time. All for the sake of efficiency.
Lest I imagine this a feature only of the business world, the incident reminded me of John Wesley. He urged his network of itinerant preachers always to be employed and never to waste any time. He followed his own rule too. The great sage Samuel Johnson once looked forward to meeting Wesley, but he was disappointed when he received only ten minutes with the founder of Methodism. It was all the time Wesley would alot him. I’d have been thrilled to waste an hour or a week with Samuel Johnson. My first question of him: “So what was it like to write the dictionary?”
With all my respect for capitalism and Methodism, I wonder if either has discovered the fruitfulness of waste. Eugene Peterson defined Sabbath as wasted time — as good a definition as I’ve seen. Even God wasted the seventh day in this way. Wasted time, I believe, is like a margin on the edge of the page. I can write in the margin, but then the paper gets so cluttered I can’t read it well anymore. Life without a margin — wasted space — makes me nervous, scattered and sad.
My Sabbath happens on Fridays. On the best Fridays, I waste as much time as possible.
I can appreciate your process of thought. Seeing some mundane random event (UPS driver readying keys) and move to something seemingly “profound” is something I do occasionally (occasionally because my thoughts are rarely profound).
Let me also concur with you regarding the need of Sabbath and margin. However, even though I greatly appreciate Eugene Peterson, I take issue with the idea of Sabbath as waste. A couple of online definitions of waste are “spend thoughtlessly; throw away” and “use inefficiently or inappropriately.”
I am surmising that you, much like myself, do not relax very well. However, I would struggle referring to rest, restoration, rejuvenation, and re-creation as “waste.” By the way, I enjoy how you write.
Seems we too often lose our being, our selves, in the need (illusion?) to always be productive. Your post reminded me of this quotation from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Of all the things we do prayer is the least expedient, the least worldly, the least practical. This is why prayer is an act of self-purification. This is why prayer is an ontological necessity.”
Peace, Mike+
Jeff, thanks for your comment. Perhaps the word “waste” is deliberately provocative. Rest is wasteful in the sense of not being immediately and visibly productive… but rest is not wasteful in the longer view.
Mike, thanks for stopping in. Heschel is a jewel.
About the Sabbath, Heschel wrote many beautiful things, and among them was that the Sabbath gives us a taste of eternity.
Time on the Sabbath is deep and slow, if it moves at all.