2022/03/28『Making Time 騰出時間』

2022/03/28『Making Time 騰出時間』

各位同仁平安

以下是3月28日「週一禱告會」康克校牧分享的禱詞短文,

讓我們一起來親近天父—先求祂的國和祂的義

誠摯邀請大家參加週一禱告會,一起禱告!

校牧室敬啟


In one of my classes, we have recently been discussing making plans and managing time. In preparing content for the course, I was watching a Randy Pausch lecture wherein he reminds his audience that “you don’t find time, you make time” for important things in life.

I have also been reading through a collection of JRR Tolkien’s letters. By interesting coincidence, I happened upon a letter he wrote to his eldest son.

In it, he expressed his deep regrets about what he felt was his failure to be personally committed to and to bring his children up in his Christian faith.

One might find this regret strange because he had spent those years industriously. He was a professor at Oxford University. He produced meaningful academic work on myth and language and story. And, most significantly, it was those years that gave us The Lord of the Rings, an incomparable piece of literature.

And yet, for Tolkien, there was regret. There was an important thing that he did not make time for and so never found time for when his children were young enough it to matter.

And I took this as a healthy reminder. A reminder that there are urgent things, maybe even important things, that will clamor for my time. But that is no excuse to lose track of the most important things.

In another letter, Tolkien gives us a hint as to what those important things might be:

“So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to moved by it to praise and thanks.”

最近在我教授的一門課堂上,我和學生一起討論如何制定計劃和時間管理。我在備課的時候,參考了 蘭迪·鮑許(Randy Pausch)的演講,他在演講中提醒聽眾“你無法找到時間,你要為生活中的重要事情騰出時間”。

我最近也在閱讀 J·R·R·托爾金的書信集,一個有趣的巧合是,我偶然讀到了一封他寫給長子的信。

在書信中,他寫下 對於自己無法親自將孩子培養、扎根於基督教信仰中,表示遺憾、感到自己失敗了。

這份遺憾與挫敗也許讓他人覺得奇怪,因為那些年他是辛勤度過的,他當時是牛津大學的教授,他就神話、語言和故事領域,創作了有意義的學術著作,最重要的是,正是那些年歲中,他帶給了我們《魔戒》,一部無與倫比的文學作品。

然而,對於托爾金來說,卻還是留下了遺憾。 有一件重要的事情,他當時沒有騰出時間去做,他並未陪伴孩子足夠的時間,所以也沒有時間栽培孩子學習在信仰中站立。

我認為這是一個正向的提醒,提醒我們有些緊急的事,甚至可能是重要的事,會佔用我的時間,但這並不是我忘記、忽略最重要的事情的藉口。

在另一封書信中,托爾金向我們暗示了這些重要的事情可能是什麼:

“因此,可以這麼說,對我們任何人而言,人生的主要意義,就是利用我們所擁有的一切手段,根據自己的能力,增加對上帝的認識,因而感動而獻上讚美和感謝。”

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