The Wonder Report: April 18, 2025
The Limits of Time
Happy Friday!
It’s Good Friday, and I am grateful for another opportunity to consider anew the depth of Christ’s sacrifice and our great need of it. It was a gift to have the day off of work and an even greater gift to have had some quiet time to reflect and write here in this space. Thanks for joining me as I continue to work through the theme of time in its various forms.
Let’s get right to it!
The Burden of Humanity
I sit down at my computer, glance at the clock, and notice that the hour I had set aside to write has already dwindled to 15 minutes. Did those few minutes checking the news, the one last trip to the kitchen for a cup of tea, the text messages I needed to respond to, the email that required all the logging in and taking action, did they really rob me of time? Or did I relinquish those minutes willingly, robbed by my own lack of focus and self discipline?
This is at the heart of how I think of time: limited, restricted, easily squandered. Each part of my life vies for the minutes, the hours–a tug and pull of desires, needs, and priorities. Because I know, as deep as I go, that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing,” as Annie Dillard has famously written in The Writing Life*. And if we want a say in those things we are doing, then we need a schedule that “defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
A schedule is life. That’s what Dillard is saying. And if you know me, you know I’m all in on that philosophy. I am nothing if not a meticulous scheduler, often scribbling my intentions by the hour, painstakingly fitting the pieces of life together like a puzzle so they will all fit. They have to fit. All of them. For what is our life if we are not doing the things we want, the things that matter?
On many weekends in our shared life together, I push my husband to the limits of his patience by creating a to-list so long we can’t possibly do it all and maintain our sanity. “What sanity?” I say. Steve has a different idea. He calls me a schedule crowder, and he’s right. If I have one hour, I’ll spend it four different ways before it even starts. There’s so much to do! So much life to live! And the only thing keeping us from it is a lack of a good schedule.
But behind the self-discipline of making the minutes count and good intentions of a schedule that allows everything to fit is a fitful resistance to the limits that time places on my life. It doesn’t matter to me that we are all allotted the same number of minutes and hours each day, that we all have the same opportunity to use or squander our time. Honestly, it wouldn’t matter if I got an extra hour each day, and extra day each week. My resistance to time circles around the fact that no matter how it’s measured, there’s always a limit to it. A limit that’s hard to accept.
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The theme of limits has surfaced often during my Lenten reflections this year. I first noticed it as I was reading the account of Jesus’ wilderness temptations just after Ash Wednesday. As I read about Satan’s enticing offers of bread, glory, and immortality to a hungry and weary Jesus, I realized that what he was really offering was relief from the limits of Jesus’ incarnation. Follow me, Satan said, and you can be released from the burdens of humanity. Oh, that would have been tempting. At least for me.
But in his resistance, Jesus not only validated the provision, power, and plan of God to send his Son on a cosmic rescue mission, he also validated the worth and wonder of being human. Limits are part of the package. They reveal our creatureliness and ensure our dependence. They provide a context for our lives and situate us into a story. Limits offer us the who and the what, the when and the where that makes us who we are. If Jesus said “yes” to any of Satan’s temptations, not only would he have aligned himself with the Prince of the Air, he also would have betrayed the children of man.
Accepting our own limits has a similarly humanizing effect on us. When we recognize that we don’t have the time – or the energy, resources, or money, for that matter – to do everything we want whenever we want to do it, we accept the limits of being a person. Physically, we know we can’t do it all. Just stop by our house on a Friday evening after a busy week at the library. I am spent. But according to James Martin in The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, accepting our human limitations is also important to us spiritually: “it enables us to surrender to ultimate reliance on God, which leads to freedom” (p. 209) and “saves [us] from being a ‘human doing’ instead of a ‘human being’” (p. 210).
In her book, Reclaiming Quiet*, Sarah Clarkson writes about one of her young family’s favorite fall books, The Ox-Cart Man* by Donald Hall. Set in the Colonial era, the story is about a man and his family who gather up all their hand-made wares and farm-grown produce from throughout the past year to take to market early each fall. Clarkson writes about the litany of items the farmer brings to sell, along with the tools of his various trades that are purchased with his profits and carried back home for another year of family productivity.
Clarkson revels in her children’s love for The Ox-Cart Man because it is reminiscent of her own love for it as a child herself, when “the very same book held an almost enchanted hold over my imagination,” she writes. “That story kindled a deep sense of capability in me as I glimpsed a way of life that was fundamentally and lavishly creative even while drawing on the free things of the world: earth and seed, weather and dirt, hard work and goodwill” (p. 77).
But as an adult, Clarkson sees the extreme limits of such a life: “the marriage of the farmer and his family to this single piece of land, these few apple trees, this undulating field, these seasons, this house, this fellowship of blood and work” (p. 77-78). She recognizes these limits in her own life as a mom at home with young children. “I, too, live in a world of severe limit, but my ease within it is less complete. I am troubled by this book even as I taste its invitation,” she writes. “Each time I’ve read it this year … two questions have risen, urgent and wild: Could such a life be enough? Can I accept such limit? And I am dismayed in the slowness of my soul’s answering” (p. 78).
Asking myself the very same questions, I settle into a similar dismay.
Enough is a word I so seldom use.
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Today, on Good Friday, after walking the stations of the cross this morning and enjoying a hearty brunch out afterwards, Steve and I visited the lush gardens of Newfields, the campus that includes the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It’s “peak tulip season” according to the marketing emails from the museum, and as is our habit most years, Steve and I were eager to visit for a meander through beds of colorful bulbs, copses of flowering trees, and the occasional gurgling brook and arching fountain.
As part of our annual spring visit to Newfields, Steve and I both snap tons of photos, kneeling down or leaning in for just the right shot of a tulip or hyacinth. We admire each other's perfect shots–and maybe even admire a few of our own–and since neither of us has much of a social media presence, we text the photos to friends and family so they can enjoy the beauty too. During today's outing, though, it struck me as ironic that we were going to such great lengths to document the vernal beauty on our smart phones when the whole point of going now, during peak tulip season, is because this is both a time-sensitive and fleeting unveiling. If the tulips were here all the time, we’d grow used to them. Probably ignore them. But because they are here for only a moment, a few days or weeks each spring, we cherish them, are in awe of them. That kind of wonder can never be documented in a photo.
I paused among the tulips to relish that truth for a moment, to breathe a little more deeply, to take it all in with my senses, not just my iPhone’s lenses. I looked around at the stunning fuschia and tangerine tulips. I marveled at the perfect magenta poppies and the exquisite red bleeding hearts. This won’t last, I thought. There’s a limit here that crashes into our reality. And I felt a little bit sad about that. But I also felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude, because nestled throughout those gardens was a beauty that can be anticipated but never scheduled. A hope that can be counted on but never forced into a crowded calendar. A wonder that can be felt but never captured.
That’s what makes it so amazing.
I wonder … how do you feel about the limits of time? Does the pace of your life attempt to defy those limits? Or do you easily accept them? Do you think accepting our limits makes us more human? How?
Good Friday: Stations of the Cross Sonnets
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s my habit during Lent to spend a few minutes each Friday walking the stations of the cross at a beautiful outside garden in my community. For most Fridays, I reflect on the first 12 stations, but on Good Friday, I add the final two stations, where Jesus’ body is taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb. This year, I brought along Malcolm Guite’s Stations of the Cross sonnets as my companion, and it made the experience so rich. If you have time today, or anytime this weekend to listen, I commend these sonnets to you.
Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.
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Until next time,
Charity
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Thank you for this, Charity! I love how you tied the theme of limits to nature at the end. The limit of tulips adds to our savoring and awe of them.
I was struck by Dillard's quote you used stating a schedule “defends from chaos and whim." My immediate reaction to this was that I desire a schedule to allow me the privilege of whim! When my schedule is so packed tight there is not opportunity for whimsy to sneak up behind me. I like whimsy. I want more of it. But when I'm so scheduled it seems like an inconvenience. Perhaps whim/whimsy is hard to define. I hope you get what I'm saying.
Yesterday I was home with the girls. I had so much I wanted/needed to do with dinner guests coming that night and a friend visiting this weekend. When I only had one kid I was actually able to do most of my to-do lists... and ironically this stressed me out more. Now that I have two kids there is much more I have to let go of, and accepting these limits is so freeing. I'll get done what I can. The rest can wait.
Happy Resurrection Sunday!