How to Inhabit Time by James K A Smith is a wonderful surprise. His voice in this book is different from his other works. It comes out of brokenness. These are lessons learned in the hardest parts of his life and this voice is quite refreshing.

One aspect of time I’m reading about now is how to live in the season of life. It can be a season in our person life. It can be a season in our culture.

This is what we’ve missed in the past 7-8 years. We missed it BADLY in 2020. The season of listening that should have happened after the murders of Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd was short lived. We did not discern the time. We did not learn.

We did not inhabit time well. We failed that season.

“To embrace seasonality is to cultivate an availability to the moment, entrusting ourselves to the Lord of history and wiling to live through the mystery that is time. This requires a special kind of patience that is a willingness to not judge a zig until we’ve lived through the zag, so to speak — to wait for the season to unfold before resenting what it’s taken. Sometimes the gift comes at the end.

This was our massive failure in our culture and in American Christianity. We felt our whiteness and control slipping away, so we didn’t wait for “zag” when we felt the “zig.” We didn’t want to discern. We wanted to be comfortable. Returning to comfort was our priority. PERIOD. We felt something being “taken” and didn’t wait for the season to reveal THE GIFT that was there.

We are poor models of inhabiting time. We value our comfort too much and pile noise into our lives to keep from dealing with the emptiness inside. We leave “time” on a line and want the past far behind us all in the name of our own comfort.

We miss whole seasons. And guess what? Those lessons will keep coming around.

Embrace the season of life. Watch for the possibilities as they unfold. The gift may very well be at the end. Don’t miss it.