Never Underestimate the Value of Time
By FR. MIKE SCHMITZ
In 1977, two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, conducted a study to prove how easy it can be to underestimate how much time it will take to accomplish a task. They called it the “planning fallacy.” In this study, they found that humans have a tendency to disregard historical data when it comes to making predictions. Even though we may have done the same project before and it took us a certain amount of time, we think it will take us less time the next time we do it. In fact, we think it will take us half the time it will actually take.
A few years later, a woman was writing an article about this planning fallacy, and she discovered that she too was guilty of it. She tells how she painted five rooms in her house. When she began with the first room, she thought, “It’ll take me a weekend. It’s not a big room.” But it took her a month. So when she went to paint the second room, she said, “Okay, I know the last room took me a month, but now that I’ve done it once, this room should take me only a weekend.” It took her a month. So the third time she said, “Okay, I’m not going to be fooled this time. Now that I really know how to do this, I’m sure it will take me only one weekend.” It took her a month. The same thing happened for each of the five rooms she painted.
It Just Takes Time. In the last article, we talked about how we cannot underestimate who God needs us to be. In this article, I want to talk about how we cannot underestimate how long it will take to become who God needs us to be. If this is the project of our lives, we have to be prepared to actually let it take our entire lives.
So who does God need us to be? He needs us to be the kind of people who love heroically. He needs us to be the kind of people who can trust heroically. And love and trust are two things that have to grow. I wish you could just wave a wand over someone and make them more trusting or make them love deeply. But you can’t. No matter how badly we want it to be done right away, it takes time.
I once had a couple ask me to preside over their wedding on the one-year anniversary of the day they started dating. They had been dating for about four months at that time, and they told me, “Father, we know we were meant to be married.” “But you have to have the big conversations,” I told them. They said, “We’ve already had the big conversations. What do you think we were doing the first four months of our relationship?” I had to tell them no in the kindest, gentlest way. We negotiated the date because the reality is that there are some things that only time can reveal.
Times of Silence. The Bible is full of stories of people who had to wait. Some even had to live through times when it seemed as if God wasn’t doing anything for them. They cried out because they felt they were waiting a long time for God to act. One of these people was Daniel. In Daniel, chapter 10, he tells of a vision he had in which he saw this massive war where there was so much destruction and death that he felt as if he might die just looking at it. Afterward, he says, he mourned for three full weeks: “I ate no savory food, took no meat or wine, and did not anoint myself at all until the end of the three weeks” (Daniel 10:3). During this whole time, Daniel prayed and begged God to show him what the vision meant. But God seemed to be silent.
But then on the twenty-fourth day, Daniel looked up and saw an angel, who told him what the vision meant. You see, God already knew Daniel’s need, but Daniel didn’t know that. He had to wait for God to answer, and there were times it felt as if no answer would come. But the truth is, we cannot underestimate what God is doing when it seems that God is doing nothing—because his silence is not the same thing as his absence. Sometimes, in fact, his silence is absolutely necessary.
If you’ve ever tried to grow Chinese bamboo, you can get a sense of what I mean. You plant the seed and you water it and make sure it has everything it needs. Nothing happens for the first year, so you keep taking care of the soil. Nothing happens the second or the third or the fourth year. Actually, something is happening, but you just can’t see it. For those four years, that seed has been setting out a root system that goes so wide and goes so deep underground that when the fifth year comes, that bamboo seed sprouts and grows to ninety feet in five weeks. When it seemed like that seed was doing nothing, something necessary was happening.
The same is true for us. While we’re waiting, God is doing something in the silence that he couldn’t do without that silence. He is doing something in our brokenness that he couldn’t do without that brokenness. He is doing something in the darkness that he couldn’t do without that darkness. He is making us into people who can trust. You can’t trust unless you need to trust, and that’s how he uses the times of darkness and silence and brokenness.
Turn the Page. But what should we do in those times when we’re waiting, and God seems to be doing nothing? Turn the page. Have you ever been reading a book, and you get to a part where something really bad happens to your favorite character, and you just stop reading and throw it against the wall? But then you pick it up again, and you keep reading because you want to know what comes next. Just because something terrible has happened doesn’t mean you abandon the story. It means you turn the page.
The last book of the Old Testament is the Book of the prophet Malachi. If you were to stop reading the Bible at the end of Malachi, you’d probably be pretty disappointed. You’d wonder what happened to all the things God had promised he would do. But if you just turned the page—just one single page—you would come to the Gospel of Matthew and the story of God fulfilling all these promises.
There’s a passage in the Book of Isaiah that says, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (9:1). The people weren’t just standing in the darkness; they were walking through it.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said something similar when he said that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. We can truly understand our life only when we’ve already lived through it and look back to see everything that has happened over all those years. Until then, we have to live it forward. We have to keep walking. We have to finish the story because there’s no way to know how the story is going to end until the story has actually ended.
“In the End . . . ” Earlier in that prophecy from Isaiah, he says, “Where once [God] degraded the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, now he has glorified the . . . land across the Jordan” (8:23). The land that was once degraded has been lifted up and transformed. It didn’t happen immediately after it was degraded. It happened years and years later, when Jesus came to live in it.
So are you okay if you have to endure a time of suffering if you know that God will restore you in the end? We know that healing and reconciliation and recovery are not the only possible outcomes when we are suffering. Death is a possible outcome. Losing a spouse is a possible outcome. Lifelong illness is a very real possibility. But God is still present in those things. He is still active even when my chapter is over. The story still goes on long after we have met the Lord.
The Catechism sums up the hope we have, even when we find ourselves walking in darkness. In the end, it says, “we shall know the ultimate meaning of the whole work of creation.” In the end, we will “understand the marvelous ways by which God’s Providence led everything towards its final end.” In the end, “The Last Judgment will reveal that [God’s] justice triumphs over all the injustices committed by his creatures and that God’s love is stronger than death” (CCC, 1040).
May we never underestimate what God is doing when it seemed that he was doing nothing.
From The Word Among Us
Fr. Mike Schmitz is the Director of Youth and Young Adult Ministries for the Diocese of Duluth. His book, A World Undone, is available at wau.org.
