Gone

Two years after I graduated college the band Switchfoot released their double-platinum album Gone. By then I had racked up what I felt was more than my fair share of post-college failure. I cold-quit the insurance sales job that promised the big cash because I dreaded yet another cold-call; I moved my entire life to New York for the man I thought I knew and loved, but within the year rejected that looming question and moved back to my parents’ home with head hung; I lost my dear and best friend to an ugly church situation; and I found myself already having lived in yet another state with four jobs in my wake working, this time, as the beer-cart-girl, or so they called me on the greens, making sandwiches at the pro-shop in between runs. Oh, how dreams die hard. And pride for that matter.

Feeling as if I was flipped around in a world where I was unsure I would even get a grasp enough to know I could pay my rent more than one month at a time or know which state I would live in for more than one year, I was rapidly losing clarity. Was it the world or me that was flipping around…I was not sure. The sales jobs that promised the cash flow always seemed to whisper my name when I was sick of making my ten bucks an hour to pay the rent and waitressing to buy groceries. I can sell, I knew that. But I desperately hated it. Desperately. And the mantra of the sales world, and much of the business world haunted me…

Time is Money.

Oh, how that urked me. And though I was unsure if it was world or me flipping upside down in the post-college blur of life, I was beginning to have some clarity about one thing…Time.

Time was not money. 

Whoever came up with that was sorely mistaken and has fueled many a driven soul into deeper greed, personal disconnection, and maybe guilt. I distinctly remember driving one day and asking myself why don’t we say time is relationships?  For instance, why are we not sad at the end of the day when we haven’t stewarded our time to deepen or begin new friendships with those around us instead of made more money? 

It was around this time I heard the song Gone by Switchfoot. A hip song with deep lyrics I found myself singing along within a few listens.  The words toward the end grabbed me, and in the world where I thought I was flipping I realized maybe I was becoming more stable that I knew:

Life is more than money

Time was never money

Time was never cash…

All the riches of the Kings end up in wills

We got information in the information age

But do we know what life is outside of our convenient Lexus cages…

"Time was never money." Never. This line placed my thoughts within the grand history of time…God created time, is not bound by time, yet works within time, and time.was.never.money. Oh, how freeing this was. Nine years later I still enjoy singing along.

For balance sake I recognize that we do spend some of our time working to make money. And appropriately so. I know there is a counter-culture that idealistically offers the “why does the world even have to have money, can’t we all just love each other and live like the Rainbow Family” pie in the sky sort of ideology.  Thankfully, Solomon clearly offers us an antidote to both the driven and the naïve in the book of Ecclesiastes:

There is a time for everything under heaven.

Everything.  But I offer that in lieu of hearing that urking aforementioned statement and assuming it is correct and is just the way things are in this society, let us remember time is not money, and it never was. Time is a gift of God.  And as I am beginning a new season with my small group I am resurrecting anew this old thought of mine and asking why is time not transformation?