Matters That REALLY Matter—Conversation with Richard Dinwiddie

There is a tyranny to which most of us bend the knee, often on a daily basis. Yes. Right here in America.

Not all tyranny comes by force. It can come from any source that tries to control us against our will, even to how we act and what we think. Thomas Jefferson recognized this in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush,  “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

In the mid-twentieth century, Charles Hummel wrote a magazine article, “Tyranny of the Urgent” (HIS magazine, published by Inter-Varsity Press, which is available as a reprint from major online booksellers). Hummel’s thesis was simple, yet compelling. There are two broad categories of responsibilities in our lives, those that are truly important and those that are pressingly urgent. The tyranny of the urgent is the seemingly endlessly repeated scenario in which we feel compelled to do against our deepest desires those things we believe we have to do at the tragic cost of those actions we know are in our long-term best interest.

The urgent seems most often to be evident in our jobs. We know that if we are to keep a job, we must accomplish certain assignments.  That is not what we are talking about here. That is the nature of life. We are really talking about making the choice to put things that we tell ourselves “must be done now” ahead of those things that actually have far more intrinsic value.

The urgent often is something very good. We have all seen people who continually neglect their family in order to help others or serve God. For example, I recall speaking with a man who had retired from a lifetime in the ministry. He sorrowfully delivered his assessment of those years as he said, “If I had it to do over again, I would spend more time with my boys.”

This concept has found its way into pop music. Sandy and Harry Chapin’s 1970’s hit, “Cat’s in the Cradle,” tells of a father who is too busy to spend time with his child who repeatedly tries to get his attention. Eventually, when the father tries to reach out to the child who has grown up and started a family, he discovers that the child is too busy for him. The song concludes with the lines,

And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me,
He’d grown up just like me–,
My boy was just like me.

The seemingly urgent had crowded out the important, but like the minister, the father didn’t realize it until it was too late.

The sinister power of the tyranny of the urgent is its ability to deceive us into thinking it always trumps the important, that we have no choice. The stress that we feel extracts a horrible toll of guilt, frustration, unhappiness, and defeat. If we can convince ourselves that the urgent really is the important, we can spend our lives focused on empty priorities only to find out that we have irrevocably lost those things and people that ultimately mean the most to us.

Discerning the difference between the urgent and the important is a matter of wisdom. Making the commitment to give the important its critical priority over the urgent is a matter of will. Acting out that commitment into daily life?  That is exercise of a freedom we always have, whether we believe it or not, the freedom to exercise the power of choice.  The result is the satisfaction of knowing that we are living by our own true values, not those that primarily benefit someone else.

And that freedom, as the familiar MasterCard commercial puts it — “priceless.”

c. 2010. Richard D. Dinwiddie. All rights reserved.

Most of us give away our priceless lives far too easily.

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote The Social Contract in 1762, his subject was what we call “The Consent of the Governed.” That is, the political dynamic which posits that the people give up some of their individual freedom to a government of their own free will in return for political and social stability. This social contract concept plays out in many areas of life, those numerous situations that are characterized by an exchange of one’s time, i.e., part of their life, to another person or organization in return for some perceived benefit. In my life, this would include areas that could be defined as spiritual, educational, musical, various other kinds of professional, and personal.

For example, one of many parts of my life is that of a college professor. My students enroll in my classes of their own free will. They pay tuition and buy books with money earned in exchange for someone’s time and effort. They use their earned resources to get to the class site or to engage in an online class. They surrender a portion of their lives for the length of the class period to receive the information or training for which they came and for which they paid their tuition.

The common fallacy is to conceive of the time involved as being the length of the class. But, how much time actually is involved? The real time is the number of life-hours being bartered. Say there are 40 students in the class (although my online classes usually number 65-100 – or more). To get the actual time, multiply the number of students by the length of the class, which in this case is about an hour, resulting in 40 person-hours, or an aggregate of 2,400 minutes actually entrusted into my hands. It follows, then, that if I waste 5 minutes, I waste a total of 200 minutes of real-life time. The phrase “killing time” begins to take on a new dimension.

The teacher has a moral responsibility to honor the implicit contract, to give full value to each student in exchange for part of life they can never regain. Not incidentally, the contract works both ways. The students are responsible to be fully attentive and use wisely both their own time and the time they are receiving from the teacher.

All this raises a question I must answer: How do I treat that part of other’s priceless lives that they entrust to me? Do I try to provide value for every minute they give me? Do I show respect for their time? For example, am I usually on time, or am I frequently late?

Furthermore, how do I value my own life? The contract works on the personal level as well as the social. How I treat my own time is a reflection of how I respect myself. We need to treat our own time with the most profound respect. It is part of a contract with ourselves.

The passage of time is relentless. It cannot be recalled. It is what Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “If,” called “the unforgiving minute” that needed to be “filled with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.”

Your time and the time of everyone entrusted in some way to you is priceless. Make every moment one of maximum value to all concerned. Treat it with respect. Honor the contract. God gives us the time to use, and he will hold us accountable for how we use it. Don’t give it away for nothing.

c. 2010. Richard D. Dinwiddie. All rights reserved.

Welcome to mattersthatreallymatter.com. We are starting a national conversation about some of the most important areas where the real us actually lives. We will explore how a consistent, genuinely sustainable Christian worldview informs not only faith, but also such critical life-shaping areas as relationships, education, humanities and the arts, ministry, and communication. On occasion, special guests will be invited to make their own valuable contributions to the discussion.

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