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Quality time

Kathy Cawsey

A new phrase has appeared in these days of non-resident parents and dual-career families: “quality time”. “Quality time” suggests that it doesn’t matter if you can’t spend much time with your children, as long as the time you do spend is “high quality” – time spent “bonding” or doing exciting things, and not just grocery shopping or cleaning the house.

My parents don’t buy it. There is no quality time, they say, except quantity time. While it’s important to spend time talking and “bonding”, it’s more important just to spend time doing things together, whether it is cleaning out the attic, playing catch or even just sitting in the same room doing different activities. It’s the time, the being there, that counts. No matter how “high quality” the two or three hours a week spent in quality time is, it simply cannot have as much impact as the everyday, ordinary time of the rest of the week.

One of the hardest things about living overseas this year has been keeping up my relationships with people back home. My friendships simply cannot grow or develop when I’m not there. A 15-minute telephone call each week with my family – no matter how intense – cannot replace the time we spend together when I’m living at home. Keeping up friendships from this distance takes work – and time. I spend easily an hour on e-mail every day, chatting, reporting my news or just rambling on. I don’t worry about the cost of long-distance phone calls, knowing that, even when my bank book pinches, they are worth it. When I do go home, I try to make time to see everyone one-on-one, even if it makes my own schedule overly hectic. Relationships don’t just happen – they take work, energy and time.

A friend of mine here is engaged to be married to his girlfriend back in North America. We joke that he is the only person at the university who has a date every single night of the week – “chatting” on the Internet with his fiancée. Two hours, every single night. It doesn’t matter if he has work to do or there’s a party going on or people are going out to a movie. He’ll meet us afterwards, if necessary. Nothing takes precedence over that talk. “What on earth do you have to talk about for that long?” people ask him. It doesn’t matter what they talk about – they’re just spending time together. That friend’s relationship has lasted long after many equally serious long-distance relationships here have broken off.

Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to haul myself out of bed on Sunday mornings to make the 10 a.m. church service. Many university students have the same problem. Remembering to pray before I go to bed, after staying up until 2 a.m. to write an essay, is nigh on impossible; if I do remember, I have a tendency to fall asleep before I’m finished. Read the Bible? You’ve got to be joking – I have a nine-page, single-spaced reading list to crash through before next Wednesday. When I do have some free time, I’d rather spend it out with my friends or playing soccer than in church.

It’s hard to provide a convincing answer, even to myself, when people ask why we should go to church. “Duty” just doesn’t hold much appeal. The singing is good, the sermon not always, and the rest seems more ritual than anything meaningful. The people are important, I guess, but I have friends outside church. Why can’t I, many people ask, be a perfectly good Christian without going to church?

You can. And some people can manage to keep up a meaningful long-distance relationship on a 10-minute phone call a week. But it’s hard, and most of us can’t do it.

A relationship with God is just like any other relationship. Going to church, reading the Bible, talking to God are all ways of spending time with God. There is no such thing as “quality time” with God. (Maybe it’s all quality time; after all, this is God we’re talking about!) It’s quantity time that counts.

Kathy Cawsey lives in Waterloo, Ont. This article was first published in 1998 in the Presbyterian Record.

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Last modified January 31, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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