Download as MS Word Document

Session 3 – The Clock

During this session participants will:

• explore the complexities of ordering our lives in today’s world
• examine what causes stress in the ordering of our lives and what can be done to ease this
• engage with Christian and other traditions to see what light they shed onto our experience
  be equipped to make appropriate decisions about how they use their time
• helped to achieve an appropriate work-rest balance

WELCOME

Ice Breaker Activity

Invite everyone to share their favourite or most effective time-saving tip

Opening Theme Prayer

Invite people to place prayers into the prayer box if they didn’t do so as they arrived (requests will be prayed for towards the end of the meeting).

Invite anyone to share any encouragement they’ve received or been able to offer since the last session.

Introduce the theme of the session and then lead the opening prayer:

Lord God, who has made us all into one body in Christ,
enable us to honour one another in our working and daily lives.
Help us to understand the ways in which we depend upon one another.
Teach us to bear one another’s burdens and share one another’s joy.
In our varied occupations enable us to serve one another with dignity and carefulness.
May we receive with gratitude the work of other people.
So continue your work of binding us together in your human family.
Amen.

 

[Source: John Ogden]

Video clip

This short animated clip has some important things to say about ordering our lives.

It’s produced by www.aish.com who are a Jewish company, and there is a helpful and interesting quotation from the Talmud towards the end.

Discussion

As an introduction to the topic, ask people to think about their response to the following question:

How busy are you?

In the main or smaller groups (depending on the size and make-up of your group), invite people to share what they’ve discovered about the times they’ve said “I’m busy” since the last session.

Pool ideas on flipchart paper or similar noting the types of situation that caused this and whether they were positive or negative statements at the time.

Was the hearer’s perception the same as the speaker’s?

Did anyone never say “I’m busy”? Does this feel a good or a bad thing to them? (It could be a very positive feeling but it could also be that they’re under-used, unfulfilled or bored.)

WORD

Activity

This activity can be used to link the Welcome and Word sections of this session.

Mark Greene, currently Executive Director of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, has long been involved with issues of connecting the workplace with faith. One of his books Thank God it’s Monday is considered by many to be a classic in the field. In this book, he proposes the idea of a ‘Human Flourishing Quotient’ which is suggested as a useful way of checking whether one’s current lifestyle enables one to flourish physically, spiritually, mentally, and socially. It can also help in putting one’s discipleship at work into the context of the rest of life.

If you want to do your activity, print enough of the grid below for everyone to have a copy and allow a few minutes for it to be filled in before continuing with the discussion about how to make changes. If you think it’s valuable but don’t want to do it in the group, you could suggest members do it after the session. If this is the case, it’d be wise also to include the possible options for change.

Human Flourishing Quotient (HFQ)
[From: Mark Greene, Thank God it’s Monday (3rd edn 2001, p. 82)]

Score yourself on a scale of 1 to 10
(10 is ‘yes’ and great, 1 is ‘no’ and awful) for each of these statements:-

• My relationship with God is flourishing and I get about the right amount of time with him
• I get about the right about of time for family/key relationships
• I get about the right amount of sleep
• I get about the right amount of time for rest
• I get to do things that refresh me reasonable often
• My lifestyle allows me to stay reasonably healthy
• I get about the right amount of time for church life
• I work about the right amount of time
• I’m reasonably satisfied with the structure of my life
• I feel that there’s another Christian who knows me, to whom I can open up my life

How many points did you get in total? Total points = 

How did you do?

Obviously the HFQ is a blunt instrument and some aspects of our lives are more important than others, but anything over 70 would be very good; 50-69 and there’s certainly room for improvement; under 50 and we’re probably keen to make some changes.

Is there a way forward?

There are several possible answers to the question ‘is there a way forward?’ and everyone needs to think about which is right for them. For Greene, some of the key possibilities are:

• Realign your priorities with God’s priorities and your responsibilities
• Change your attitude to the life you have
• Change aspects of your behaviour
• Change the terms of your job
• Change corporate ethos and structures (by which Greene means that there might be ways in which you could suggest changes to your working practices to enable yourself and others to flourish. These might be very small changes – e.g. is there a more civilised time to hold that regular team meeting? – or occasionally they might mean raising a bigger issue.)
• ‘Change job’

Non Biblical Reading

This folk tale appears in various forms in different parts of the world

“Two men chopped wood near each other for a whole day. One man chopped constantly without any breaks. The second rested for ten minutes in each hour. At the end of the day, when everything was checked and counted, it was the second man who had chopped more wood. Being greatly puzzled by this, the first man asked his colleague how this had happened. “It’s simple”, said the second man. “Whenever I rested, I sharpened my axe.’”

Reflection on the Readings

You may have your own reflections on these passages, but if not here are some thoughts as a starter for teaching and/or discussion.

• Theologians throughout the ages have affirmed that God is omnipresent. Therefore all times (and places) are holy even though some are set apart as special by divine or human intentionality. So we must keep watch for divine movements in ordinary time – how can/do we do this?
• Theologians also argue that there are 2 types of time – chronos and kairos. These are both Ancient Greek words for time. Chronos is ‘evenly moving clock time’ whereas kairos is ‘the right or opportune moment’. Chronos is quantitative; kairos is qualitative. Chronos is measured by clocks so we tend to race against it. Kairos is experienced rather than measured: Isocrates wrote that it is seen by those “who manage well the circumstances which they encounter day by day, and who possess a judgment which is accurate in meeting occasions as they arise and rarely misses the expedient course of action”. Some say kairos it ‘God’s time’ and it has been described as ‘the lively moments of creative transformation’. Does the idea of life being a dynamic interplay of chronos and kairos help us as we think about our use of time?
• When we think of Sabbath, are we doing so to escape from the anxious character of our world (possibly a link with chronos) or are we resting and sharing in the enjoyment and flourishing of God’s creation around us (possibly a link to kairos)?
• God resting at the end of creation is a sign of sovereignty: God rested because he was able to. For us to rest on the Sabbath requires an act of faith that the world we belong to will operate for a day without us.
• Rest is active, not passive. “Rest” is a verb and “work” is a noun. Do we have to work at taking rest?
• The need for rest was not a purely human thing – Leviticus 25 says that the earth itself is entitled to rest: ‘One full year of every seven, the earth must be given time to rest’.
  The commandment to observe the Sabbath is repeated 12 times in the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Christian Bible)
• ‘A good Sabbath makes a good society’ by balancing the claims of work and celebration. In prayers at the beginning and end of Shabbat, Jews thank God for the blessing of work. Not working on one day is tied to working on the other six. So, Sabbath affirms the value of work and interprets it as an important dimension of human identity.

Discussion

We’ve just heard two people talking about the personal cost of their work and roles, and how they try to balance their own needs against those of other people, whether expressed or perceived.

• What are you spending and being spent for?
• What commands and receives your best time, your best energy? (Are you happy with your answers?)
• Is there a difference between a job and a vocation? Can the former turn into the latter (and vice verse?)
• How do we say “no”? Are there times when we shouldn’t say “no”?
• In his blog on 25 February 2013, Richard Branson said that the “working life isn’t 9-5 anymore. The world is connected. Companies that do not embrace this are missing a trick.” In an apparently opposite stance, some companies now turn off the email feed to staff portable devices at a certain time each evening to encourage a better work-life balance (Volkswagen is one of these and their electronic systems are turned off at 6pm). What do you think of this? Positive (more family time) or negative (restricting the ability to work when you want to)?
• Which is the ‘counterbalance’ to work: is it ‘leisure’ or rest’? Is there a difference?

WORSHIP

Opening Prayer

Managers, commuters,
Workers stuck behind computers…
Lay your burdens down,
Come to me and rest.

Labourers on the soil,
All who dig and sweat and toil….
Lay your burdens down,
Come to me and rest.

Overstretched and overstressed,
Underpaid, abused, oppressed…
Lay your burdens down,
Come to me and rest.

Unemployed or long-term ill,
Those with too much time to fill…
Lay your burdens down,
Come to me and rest.

In the home, on the road,
Those with dangerous overload…
Lay your burdens down,
Come to me and rest.

Those who never get a break,
Those who give while others take…
Lay your burdens down,
Come to me and rest.

[Source: Life Balance Robert Warren and Susan Mayfield (Church House Publishing, 2005) Copyright (c) The Archbishop’s Council of the Church of England]

Song

You may not be able (or even want) to sing in your group. You are free to choose whether you sing, or listen to music, or watch a video clip with this song in the background.

Be still for the presence of the Lord by David J Evans

This is available on several CDs and is also downloadable from iTunes. There are also various online versions of the music alone with enough verses to sing to on the internet, one of which is at http://www.billysloan.co.uk/songs/be_still_for_the_presence_of_the_lord.html

There are also a number of versions online with pictures so you might want to use one of these for use either as a song or a meditation/reflection. Here are some examples:

WITNESS

Prayer for others

Place a candle in the centre of the room, and light it. Invite people to place around the candle any newspaper cuttings that they have brought with them, introducing the topic if it is not obvious.
(If you are unable to use a candle in your venue, please choose another suitable focus for prayer instead.)

Lead a time of open prayer on the themes that can be seen before you. Invite people to pray for other people’s themes, with the leader making sure no topics is missed out.

Each bidding could end with:

God who controls time and gives us time
Help us to use it wisely as we live and work for you

Open Prayer

Continue in prayer using the topics in the ‘Prayer Box’.

Again, those who are confident in praying out loud should be encouraged to take a piece of paper and pray appropriately. The leader should make sure that all requests are prayed for.

Practical Action

Here’s a statement and question about work-life balance that is worth considering on a regular basis, whether as a review-type process or as a question to ask yourself whenever you feel you’re not quite in control of your daily activities:

“One of the biggest challenges we face is how to live a balanced life. We have family, we have friends, we have work, we have church. How can I apportion my time in such a way that I’m not full of stress and never fully present at any one of those particular bases as it were? Here’s a definition for you of a balanced life: a balanced life is when you do the right thing at the right time. So ask yourself this question: am I doing the right thing right now?”

 

Quotation used by permission of Geoff Shattock and WORKTALK. All rights reserved. Visit www.worktalk.gs for details of the WORKTALK ministry.

You may want to watch the following video clip produced by www.worktalk.gs where Geoff Shattock says the words above (the first 28 seconds of the video clip)

So often we don’t take action because it gets crowded out of our lives. Accepting that we can’t all do everything, and being reminded by Andrea that none of us are superheroes, is there something that you want to take a stand on but haven’t yet done so? Something that you feel needs changing in your community, workplace, or areas of concern.

Reflect on this and decide what action you can (and will) take and what action you’re going to encourage and enable someone else to do as you quite rightly haven’t got time.

Active Prayer

We focus this week on our feet. It is said that most people dislike their feet and think it’s great that they’re covered up most of the time. Yet they are the part of our body that takes us most of the places we go. If it’s warm enough, and if people dare, invite them to take their shoes and socks off – don’t push though – it is true that many people will be embarrassed to do so.

Invite everyone to sit quietly and, with or without foot coverings, reflect on the number of different kinds of footwear they have for different types of occasion, activity, or terrain. Think about the different levels of comfort and support. Think about where each type of footwear takes you. Then, think of where you might go this coming week. But before you set out, imagine Jesus kneeling down in front of you, very gently and lovingly washing your feet in preparation for all the places you will go and the people and situations you will meet. Ask God to help you to walk in his footsteps as you follow the path that your discipleship will lead you on.

After a suitable time of quietness, say the closing theme prayer together:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands on earth but yours,
No feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he goes about to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands,
Yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes,
You are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Amen.

Blessing / dismissal

From empty hours
And waning powers
Good Lord, deliver us.

From lack of peace
And mind’s dis-ease
Good Lord, deliver us.

From sore disgrace
And lack of face
Good Lord, deliver us.

From darkest night
From taking fright
Good Lord, deliver us.

From feeling tense
From lack of sense
Good Lord, deliver us.

 

[Used with permission. From Powerlines: Celtic Prayers About Work’ David Adam Copyright 1992, by Triangle an imprint of SPCK Publishing]

May the Strength of God pilot us.
May the Power of God preserve us.
May the Wisdom of God instruct us.
May the Hand of God protect us.
May the Way of God direct us.
May the Shield of God defend us.
May the Host of God guard us.
Against the snares of the evil ones.
Against temptations of the world
May Christ be with us!
May Christ be before us!
May Christ be in us,
Christ be over all!
May Thy Salvation, Lord,
Always be ours,
This day, O Lord, and evermore.
Amen.

 

[St Patrick]