How to Inhabit Time Quotes

“Not all change is loss, and not all loss is tragic.”
― James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“Wisdom is the unhurried fruit of time served as a mortal.”
― James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. —Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“Shame keeps craning our necks to look at our past with downcast eyes, as a life to regret. There are highly spiritualized forms of this fixation that parade themselves as holiness. But in fact this is the antithesis to grace. Shame lives off the lie of spiritual self-improvement, which is why my past is viewed as a failure. Grace lives off the truth of God’s wonder-working mercy—my past, my story, is taken up into God and God’s story. God is writing a new chapter of my life, not starting a new book after throwing out the first draft of my prior existence. Shame denies that our very being is possibility, whereas grace, by nature, is futural. Grace is the good news of unfathomable possibility. God’s sanctifying presence in my life doesn’t erase what’s gone before. Indeed, what God has prepared for me depends on what has gone before. My personal history isn’t something to regret; it is something God can deploy in ways I never could have imagined.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“This is why you can’t go home again:8 because the you that arrives is not the you that left, and the home you left is not the home to which you return.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“Enjoy life with the wife whom you love,” the Teacher counsels, “all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun” (Eccles. 9:9). The sticky words here, “vanity” and “toil,” are demoralizing and sit uneasily with the Teacher’s opening injunction: “Enjoy!” Enjoy vanity, emptiness, meaninglessness? Theologian Peter Leithart explains our confusion: The Hebrew word translated “vanity,” hebel—sometimes even (“absurdly,” Leithart remarks) “meaninglessness”—means more literally “mist” or “vapor.” “When the word is used metaphorically,” Leithart clarifies, “it emphasizes the ephemerality and elusiveness of human existence. Human life is hebel (Pss. 39:4–11; 78:33; Job 7:16) because it is impermanent, because we change and ultimately die.” When the Teacher describes “everything” as hebel (Eccles. 1:2), “he’s not saying that everything is meaningless or pointless. He’s highlighting the elusiveness of the world, which slips through our fingers and escapes all our efforts to manage it.” Human life is hebel because we are mortals: a human lifetime is like a mist that enchants us but then dissolves too quickly, a vapor that dissipates. Leithart notes that Hebel “is the name of Adam’s second son, the first human to suffer death, the first to know the reality of life’s vaporousness (Gen. 4.2). In the end, every last one of us is Abel (hebel).” The Teacher is counseling us not to resent that reality but to face it. He doesn’t despair that life is like “chasing after wind” (Eccles. 1:14); rather, as Leithart points out, the Hebrew phrase should be translated “shepherding the wind.”12 This is not a counsel of despair or resignation but rather an invitation to reframe expectations such that I can “enjoy” what’s before me, who is with me, fleeting as their presence might be. The question isn’t whether we can escape this condition but how we will receive our mortality, how we will shepherd what’s fleeting yet given.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“Ultimately, to entrust oneself to God is to entrust that it is God who has thrown us into this.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“Planting is making a promise to stay near”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealized past.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“But the question isn’t simply what’s true; the question is what needs to be said and done now, in this place and in this moment given this particular history. To assert that “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter” is not wrong in principle but temporally. It fails to recognize that “Black Lives Matter” is something that has to be said here and now because of a specific (contingent) history that got us here.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“This doesn’t mean the future is set or completely decided in advance. It’s more like concrete in its liquid state: it has been poured into a frame, but you can still make an imprint, shape it by your decisions.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“If, like the sons of Issachar, we are going to “understand the times,” we need to recognize that we discerners are also products of time. But recognizing our embeddedness in the vicissitudes of history’s contingent twists and turns is only half the work; the other half is knowing how to inherit—what to do with what we’ve been given. This is the work of discernment.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“There is a sort of fascination with the past that is an act of deliberate forgetting: it’s called “nostalgia.” Religious communities are particularly prone to this. Faith is “handed down,” a matter of traditio, and hence faithfulness can be confused with preserving the past rather than having gratitude for a legacy meant to propel us forward. The most significant problem with nostalgia is not that it remembers but what it forgets. “So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, “for we only remember half.”19 The “past” that is pined for is always selected, edited, preserved in amber, and thus decontextualized, even if this past is invoked as marching orders for restoration and recovery.20 Whenever the past is invoked as a template for the present, the first question we should always ask is, Whose past? Whose version of the past? And what does this invoked past ignore, override, and actively forget? Which half is recalled? Whose half is forgotten?”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“So, too, must the church be attuned to the living Spirit’s “conducting” in ways that are responsive to the moment: when to urge on, when to yield. Such discernment is true for the collective body of Christ in its communal witness and mission. But these dynamics of time are also important for one’s own spiritual life: to recognize, for example, seasons of a life with God, when the Spirit sometimes speaks sotto voce, almost inaudibly, and to discern what God asks of us in such a season—what God is doing in us in such a season. Hence, the wisdom and discernment of spiritual timekeeping is integral to a life well-lived.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“The Creator of the cosmos comes at us slant. He shows up in a way that also hides. God’s self-communication, as Kierkegaard would put it, is always indirect, which means it takes more than ears and eyes to see and hear.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“One might sometimes experience seasons of intense emotional connection, a kind of exuberance of the Spirit, shared in community, in which joy is the dominant note. But then one might enter a season, perhaps surprising, where God is experienced in, and as, stillness, a contemplative season in which God’s covenant faithfulness is a steady state of enduring. If the person from the exuberant season could see the “you” in that contemplative season, it might look like a kind of distance or coolness from the outside. But that exuberant “you” doesn’t yet have the capacity to comprehend the unspeakable comfort found in that contemplation to come. God’s nearness looks and feels different depending on the season you’re in.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“The same dynamic of inheritance is true in the life of faith. Every person who carries a Bible in their hands, a collection of books between two covers, is an heir to the discernment of Christian councils in the fourth century. Our battered Bibles are living relics of their work. So, too, the vast majority of Christians worldwide worship with a repertoire of practices bequeathed to us from centuries past, and our spiritual disciplines carry something of the heat and light of earlier saints in the desert. This temporal inheritance, carried in the artifacts and rituals of the church, is”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“The miracle that puzzled Nicodemus, that should astound us, is that the God of grace can redeem even me—this historical creation—can begin again with this history that lives in me, that is me. It’s the body with scars that is resurrected; it’s the me with a history that is redeemed, forgiven, graced, liberated.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“It's the body with scars that is resurrected; it's the me with a history that is redeemed, forgive, graced, liberated.”
― James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“What if the first eighteen years of your life were an Arctic winter? What if all the sunlight in your life comes late, at an oblique angle? What if the sun cyclically disappears from a life for nights that seem like they’ll never end? To grow just one membraned layer under such conditions is a feat. To add another ring—to endure—is an achievement. Some years are longer than others. Don’t compare your sturdy temperate trees to your neighbor’s Arctic forest. You can’t imagine how much implacable energy it took to grow those saplings. You might not be able to fathom what they have endured. You don’t know how ancient that forest is, how much time it has spent enveloped in darkness. Even more importantly: don’t compare the trees of your tundra existence to someone else’s equatorial rain forest. God doesn’t. They live in different conditions. The sun shines upon the just and the unjust, but not at the same angle or with the same intensity. The birch saplings that have punched up through the crust of your prior life are miracles of grace. (Remember when you thought nothing could ever grow there?) They’ve never lived through your winter. They don’t know how long your night has been. By the grace of God, you’ve endured the dark.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“the whole drama of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge who laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations. The laughter at the pretensions is divine judgment. The judgment is transmuted into mercy if it results in abating pretensions and in prompting men to a contrite recognition of the vanity of their imagination.37”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now