Ruling your realm is a concept that I’ve thought long and hard about. Each of us has a realm, and the great task of our lives is to rule it and rule it well.
Your realm has two components: space and time. Abraham Heschel, in The Sabbath, put his finger on the great problem of the modern world when he said that most of us spend all of our time trying to master the realm of space, but few of us care even a little bit about mastering the realm of time. When we think of our aspirations, our great dreams and our most captivating visions, they are typically visions of something happening in space . . . a new building for our church or a new home for our family . . . a new job in a new city, new clothes for my new body . . . The changes that we seek to make, the victories that we seek to win, the battles that we tend to fight all occur in that realm called space.
Contrary to popular opinion, space is not the final frontier; time is. Our spatial riches do little to make up for our temporal poverty. This is why some of the wealthiest and most successful people in the world are also some of the most miserable: they’ve successfully transformed the spaces that they inhabit, but they still don’t know what to do with their time.
Empty. Time in and of itself is empty. It is devoid of meaning and begs to be filled with something. Just as a spatial vacuum violently demands to be filled, so does a temporal vacuum.
We must find something to do with our time! So what do we do with it? We cram some more space into it.
Time cannot be filled with space; it can only be filled with meaning.
Meaning. There’s something that money can never buy. Do you long for riches and fame? You’ll find yourself asking questions like, but what does it all mean anyway?
Meaning is a temporal phenomenon, not a spatial phenomenon. No object holds any inherent meaning. Objects are given meaning only through their association with a particular time. Perhaps your watch is meaningful to you because it’s the watch your father gave you when you graduated from high school. Or perhaps you still have your old teddy bear from when you were a baby. I know a real estate investor who still owns the house he lived in with his family when he was 16. “I’ll never sell it,” he told me. Spatial objects acquire meaning from time; apart from a meaningful time, all objects are meaningless, regardless of how valuable they are.
Value and meaning are two different things. Value itself is less valuable than meaning. When Daddy Warbucks offered Annie a new locket, she refused, opting rather to wear the locket that she had worn since she was 4 years old. The fact that the locket that was offered to her was of greater value than the locket she was wearing was irrelevant; the one she was wearing was the one thing her parents left her when they left her. Daddy Warbucks offered her value; she opted for meaning instead.
To be rich in the spatial realm means to possess instruments of great value. To be rich in the temporal realm means to possess instruments of great meaning. A person who possesses value without meaning is an impoverished soul. A person who possesses meaning without value is an impoverished body. A person who possesses both meaning and value is rich indeed.
But at the end of the day if I had to choose between the two, I’d choose meaning in a heart beat!
So the great question is how do we make meaning? The core element of meaning is love. Making meaning is making love.
It is a shame that the phrase “making love” is so strongly associated with sexual intimacy. Most acts of sex do little to make love, and most acts that actually make love have little to do with sex.
Making love is about creating meaning in the moment. Just as value is created in the spatial realm by recognizing and filling a deficit, so meaning is created in the temporal realm by identifying a love deficit and filling it.
When Jesus summarized the Law and the Prophets in the commands love God and love your neighbor, he revealed that making love is the central task of life. This means that making meaning is the meaning of life!
Everything flows from love . . . everything of meaning, that is. Joy, peace, patience, gentleness, self-control . . . all of the instruments of meaning-making.
When Paul says, “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he is encouraging us to utilize the power of joy in our endeavor to make meaning.
The great problem of our world is not that we fill our spaces with things that lack value, but that we fill our time with things that lack meaning.
Time moves at the speed of thought. Money is currency in the spatial world; thoughts are the currency of the temporal world.
Meaningless thinking is the bane of modernity.
Making love does not begin in the interactions between one individual and another. Making love begins with your meditation.
Redeeming the time is not about counting to 300; redeeming the time is about allowing the word of God to crowd out every other thought until it is our all in all.
Meditation is the means by which we make the words of Scripture the source and content of our meaning-making.
A mind that is filled with divine meaning makes a heart that is stilled and a life that is beaming. The radiance that exudes from the lives of the truly spiritual is truly beyond value.
