Killing Autopilot: A Theology of Time in a Distracted Age

In our era of digital saturation, the feeling of being perpetually overwhelmed has become the modern baseline. I've said it before: "Busy" is the new "Fine." Someone asks how things are going and we say, "Busy!" We are busier than ever, yet we must confront a sobering question: are we actually being fruitful, or merely moving quickly?

This struggle for focus is ancient. The Ephesian culture was notoriously distracting, saturated with the cultic influences of Demeter, Cybele, Dionysus, and a host of other gods and goddesses. Amidst the noise, the Apostle Paul's letter offers a radical reorientation of how we spend our attention and our minutes. Holiness, it turns out, is not a retreat from life. It is a shrewd, strategic pivot in how we live it.

Your Attention Is Someone Else's Business Plan

In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman writes, "what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is." We live in a world vying for exactly this. The average American is inundated with thousands of advertisements every day, across screens and devices. But it isn't only about selling something. They are also hunting the hottest commodity on the market: our attention.

Apps use your phone's front-facing camera to track your eye movement, documenting where your gaze lingers. They track your scrolling patterns, noting which content you engage with and what keeps you there. The goal isn't just to get you on the app. It's to keep you there as long as possible. Over time, it reshapes our sense of reality.

C.S. Lewis captures this brilliantly in The Screwtape Letters, where a veteran demon coaches his young nephew on capturing a man's soul. The advice isn't necessarily to lure him into obvious sin. Just fruitless distraction will do. The demon writes:

"All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.'"

Not sinning isn't enough to keep us close to God. As James bluntly puts it, "it is sin to know the good and yet not do it" (James 4:17).

This is the backdrop for Paul's instruction in Ephesians 5:15:

Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise.

It's striking how little attention we pay to our own lives, why we do what we do, why we say what we say. We drift. We go on autopilot and let life happen to us. Paul is calling us out of the lumbering stupor to actually notice what we're doing, where we're stepping, and how our actions (and inactions) affect the people around us.

As Dwight Schrute once put it: "Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?' And if they would, I do not do that thing."

Switch off the autopilot. Live with intention. Cut the distractions. Do something good.

Spiritual Bargain Hunters: The Kairos Mindset

Paying attention sets us up for the next move: "making the most of the time, because the days are evil" (Ephesians 5:16). Some translations render this as "redeeming the time," which is arguably better, though it can lead to a misreading of what Paul is actually after.

The Greek word Paul uses here literally means "buying out of the marketplace." He's calling us to be shrewd spiritual merchants, bargain hunters in the marketplace of time, on the lookout for eternal opportunities a distracted world completely overlooks.

Now, we all know time is the one thing money can't buy. We waste it, spend it, make it. We say "time is money." Every person gets the same allotted amount each day. Paying attention primes us to see the opportunities God brings our way and actually seize them.

Gandalf puts it well in The Fellowship of the Ring: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." We don't get to choose how much time we have or what obstacles and opportunities life sends our way. We only get to decide what to do next.

This is where most time management advice misses the point, because the New Testament actually works with two different Greek words for time. The one most of us think about is chronos, clock time. This is what productivity influencers tell us to optimize: every minute accounted for, no time wasted, years planned out in advance.

But chronos isn't Paul's word here. He uses kairos, which is about moments, experiences, opportunities, seasons. Think of a ship captain who needs to set sail but is at the mercy of the tides. He can't schedule the moment down to the minute. He waits, watches, and seizes his chance.

Planning and scheduling are fine. My family lives or dies by our shared calendar! But we must leave room for the Spirit to act. We must leave margin for God to interrupt our days.

Henri Nouwen put it this way: "I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work."

This is exactly what James was getting at when he wrote, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring... Instead, you should say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that'" (James 4:13-15).

Leave room for God's will to derail your plans.

You Were Built for What Outlasts You

The book of Ecclesiastes is evergreen. Written nearly 3,000 years ago, it still wrestles with the same worries, fears, and major questions of life we face today, including our own mortality. Chapter 3 reminds us there is a time for everything (yes, the 1960s Byrds song is now stuck in your head).

But what about when time runs out? Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us God "has put eternity in our hearts." We are made to seek out what will outlast us. We are meant to wrestle with our mortality and the limited nature of our days here. This is precisely why these moments matter so much, why we should pay attention to how we live and invest our time in the people and experiences we hold most dear.

You only get one life. Don't sleepwalk through it.

Get up, sleeper, and rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.