Living Counterclockwise

One of my favorite scriptures in the Bible is the passage of Matthew 11:28-30 in The Message: “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.”

While we don’t often think of it this way, I am convinced that one of the reasons that Jesus Christ came to earth was to introduce us to a radical way of relating to time. Notice in the passage above that Jesus said the way to learn the unforced rhythms of grace is “to walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it.”

One of the amazing things about the life of Jesus as recorded in Scripture is that you never see Him in a hurry. Even though Jesus is the Son of God and has existed for all of eternity, as a human He never yielded to the tyranny of time. Rather than succumb to peer pressure, even from His parents, He was quick to point out that He was not ruled by time.

The ultimate example of pacing oneself through life was Jesus. He knew He only had a limited time here on earth during which to accomplish His mission, yet He daily resisted the temptation to sacrifice the important for the urgent. If He could lay aside peripheral activities for the sake of a prioritized agenda, surely we can do so ourselves.