Everyone I know has said it at least once in the past year. “Where is the time going?” It comes out as a throwaway comment at the grocery store, or at the end of a phone call, or in that quiet moment before sleep when you realize another week dissolved and you’re not entirely sure what happened in it.
“Where is the time going?” has almost become a cultural reflex. It’s become a shared sigh we exhale together. But I’ve been sitting with a different question lately. Not where is the time going, but when did we stop paying attention to it?
Time is not what we think is. We know this. Could time be speeding up? Certainly. But I don’t think time is actually “disappearing.” I think we are.
The Sickbed and the Clock
I have spent long seasons of my life in caregiving. Not the everyday, common kind that cooks for our families or stays on top of the cleaning and laundry, but the in depth, full, primary caregiver of an actively dying person role. The kind that doesn’t have a shift change or a lunch break, or even sleep for nights in a row.
Not the kind where someone sleeps peacefully and you sit nearby reading. The kind where someone you love needs you every single hour, day and night, with needs as constant and urgent as a newborn who can’t tell you what’s wrong. Where you work through the night and into the morning, and the morning bleeds into afternoon, and there’s no marker for where one day ended and another began except exhaustion.
In those seasons, time did something different. It stopped evaporating. Every hour was fully accounted for. Every minute had weight. You couldn’t skip it, and you couldn’t scroll through it. You could only be inside it.
I’ve sat at bedsides watching people I loved move toward death. People who shaped who I am. And I can tell you firsthand, from that raw, holy, terrifying place: time doesn’t speed up when you’re fully present in it. It opens up. It becomes something you can actually feel.
The contrast is startling when you come back from it. Because the world out there? It’s moving fast. Everyone’s rushing. Almost no one seems to be inside their own hours anymore. And it’s hard – maybe even impossible – to step back into that particular perception of time once you’ve fully escaped autopilot.
The Autopilot Problem
We have built a life designed to remove us from the experience of living. Convenience is a gift, and I’m not romanticizing hard labor or suffering. But there is something real that happens when effort is required – when presence is demanded.
When you bake something from scratch, you are in the time it takes. When you sit with a person instead of texting them, something different is exchanged. When you drive somewhere in silence, you are inside the journey in a way that a podcast can quietly rob you of.
We’ve handed so much of our effort, and therefore our attention, over to things that do it faster. And faster isn’t always better. Faster is mostly just “less present.”
The result is a life that feels like it’s happening to us instead of one we’re actually living. We look up, and a month is gone. A year. A season with our kids, a chapter with someone we love, a version of ourselves we never quite got around to showing up as.
Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus:
Be very careful, then, how you live — not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. (Ephesians 5:15–16)
He wasn’t talking about productivity. He was talking about consciousness. About being awake inside your own life.
God’s Timing and Our Frustration With It
There’s another place where time teaches us something we don’t usually want to learn: when God’s timing doesn’t match ours.
I know this territory well. The season when what you’re living doesn’t look like what you believe you were promised. When you’re waiting – not patiently and prayerfully, but waiting with your jaw clenched and your heart quietly asking “is anything actually happening here?” During those times, the delay feels like suspiciously like abandonment.
But as I write this today, I’ve lived long enough to know something I didn’t know in my younger years. Sometimes the slowness is the work. Sometimes God is doing something in the waiting that couldn’t have happened any other way, and if we’re honest, we would have rushed right past it if He had let us.
Ecclesiastes opens with one of the most quoted passages in all of scripture:
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens. (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
We put it on greeting cards and quote it at funerals, but it’s actually a much harder truth than it sounds. It means that all of it – the mourning and the dancing, the tearing down and the building up, the silence and the speaking – has a time assigned to it that is not ours to determine.
Peter reminds us of the same thing from a different angle:
With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. (2 Peter 3:8)
God does not experience time the way we do. He is not behind, or in a hurry. The invitation there isn’t to resign ourselves to powerlessness. It’s to trust the one who holds all of it, including the parts that feel like they’ve stalled.
Moses, at the end of his life, prayed something that has always inspired me:
Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)
Teach us. As in, we don’t naturally know how to do this. As in, being conscious of the finite nature of our time is something we have to learn… and the learning shapes something in us.
A Mist, and What That Means
James doesn’t soften it. He asks, then answers, us:
What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. (James 4:14)
That’s not meant to devastate us. It’s meant to wake us up.
If our days are numbered – and they are – then every single one of them matters in a way we rarely act like they do. Not in a performance way. Not in a hustle-and-grind way. But in a this is real, this is happening, and I am here kind of way.
The hours we don’t see are the ones we weren’t present for. They still happened. We were just somewhere else.
Presence as a Practice of Faith
Coming back to presence – real presence, not performed presence – is an act of faith. It’s a way of saying “this moment is where God put me, and I’m going to be in it.”
That might look like taking the long way home sometimes. Maybe it’s sitting without a screen, letting a conversation go longer than is convenient, or choosing the slower option not because you have to, but because you need to remember what it feels like to be inside your own life.
It might look like sitting with hard things instead of numbing them – heartache, grief, uncertainty, the long wait – and trusting that God is inside that space with you. That is the practice and the lesson I’ve been learning and embodying in recent years, and what it has taught me most evidently is that the slowness is not punishment. That the silence is not emptiness.
Isaiah wrote:
But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. (Isaiah 40:31)
Walking. Not rushing. Not skipping steps. Walking, and being held in it.
Closing Thoughts
If time feels like it’s slipping, maybe the question isn’t how to slow it down. Maybe the question is: where are you, while it’s passing?
Come back. Just… come back to the ultimate now. The present moment.
You don’t have to unplug from everything or become someone you’re not. But you can choose, today, to be more inside your own hours. To notice what’s in front of you and what you’re experiencing, in a tangible way, in every moment. To let what’s happening actually land.
It is consciousness.
The God who made time also made you, and He placed you in this particular season, with these particular people, in this particular moment, on purpose.
Don’t miss it.
Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)
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