Overflow: Who Gets Your Time?

There is a question that most of us never stop long enough to ask. Not because it is too hard to find the answer, but because we are too busy to sit with it. The question is this: if how you spend your time is how you spend your life, then what are you actually spending your life on?

Time is the one resource that cannot be recovered. You can earn more money, replace a possession, recover from a bad decision. But the hour that just passed is gone permanently. That is not meant to frighten you. It is meant to wake you up. Psalm 90:12 captures this perfectly, urging us to ask God to help us understand the brevity of our days so that we might grow in wisdom. There is a number attached to every human life. None of us knows what it is, but every single day, that number gets smaller by one.

So the question is not whether your time is being spent. It is being spent regardless. The question is whether it is being spent on what actually matters.

The Calendar Does Not Lie

Someone once said that you should not tell them what you value. Instead, show them your budget and your calendar, and they will tell you what you value. That cuts deep, and it is supposed to. Most of us would say that our faith matters, that our family matters, that our relationships matter. But the calendar tells a different story for a lot of us.

Here is how it usually happens. School becomes a job. The job expands. Kids develop activities. The house needs something. A hobby gets picked up. A commitment gets added. Screens and streaming and scrolling fill in every remaining gap. And before long, every minute has somewhere to be. When every minute is already spoken for, anything unplanned starts to feel like a threat. An intrusion. A problem.

But what if some of those so-called interruptions are actually the point?

The Story That Changes Everything

In Mark chapter 5, Jesus is on his way to do something urgent. A man named Jairus, a leader in the local synagogue, has fallen at Jesus' feet in desperation. His daughter is dying. Jesus agrees to go. The crowd follows, pressing in from every direction.

On the way, a woman who has been suffering from a debilitating illness for twelve years sees her moment. She has spent everything she had on doctors. She has gotten worse, not better. But she believes that if she can just touch the edge of Jesus' robe, she will be healed. So she reaches out through the crowd and touches it.

Immediately, she is healed. And immediately, Jesus stops.

His disciples are baffled. They are surrounded by a crowd. Everyone is touching him. There is a dying child waiting. Why is he stopping now? But Jesus keeps looking around until the woman comes forward, trembling, and tells him what she has done. And he looks at her and says that her faith has made her well. Her suffering is over.

While he is still speaking to her, a messenger arrives with devastating news. Jairus' daughter has died. It is too late. There is no point in troubling Jesus any further.

But Jesus goes anyway, and he raises the girl from the dead.

What is remarkable about this story is not just the miracles. It is the posture of Jesus in the middle of them. He was on his way to do something extraordinarily important, and a person in need did not become an obstacle. She became the moment. He stopped. He saw her. He called her daughter.

Sometimes what we call an interruption has a name.

But Jesus Also Got in the Boat and Left

Here is where it gets more complicated. Because the very next chapter of Mark shows the other side of this. In Mark chapter 6, the apostles have just returned from being sent out to preach and heal. There are so many people coming and going that Jesus and his disciples cannot even find time to eat. And so Jesus tells them to get away to a quiet place and rest. And they leave. By boat. Even with all those people still there.

So in one chapter, Jesus stops everything for one person. In the next, he leaves even though many people still need him.

This is not a contradiction. It is a portrait of a life that is surrendered to God rather than controlled by a schedule or by the demands of others. Sometimes faithfulness looks like stopping. Sometimes it looks like leaving. Sometimes it looks like taking a nap, which, for the record, Jesus did more than anyone else in the Gospels.

The goal is not to maximize productivity. The goal is to be present enough to notice what God is doing and to be surrendered enough to follow where he leads.

Putting the Calendar on the Altar

Romans 12:1 calls followers of Jesus to offer themselves as living sacrifices. Not dead ones. Living ones. Which means we give everything to God and then we go live our lives, already belonging to him, letting him be in charge of what those lives are spent on.

That includes time. Especially time.

This week, consider doing something uncomfortable. Audit your actual week. Not just what makes it onto your calendar, but everything. Commute time, screen time, sleep, hobbies, work, family, all of it. Lay it out in front of you. Then pray one honest prayer: show me whether my time belongs to you.

Then ask four questions of what you find.

What needs more of my time? What is getting too much? What needs to stop entirely? And where do I need to leave space, space for rest, for people, for prayer, for the unexpected moments that turn out to be the most important ones?

A surrendered life requires a surrendered calendar. Not a more crowded one. Not a perfectly optimized one. A surrendered one.

Because the days are numbered. And the only way to spend them well is to stop treating them as entirely your own.