GOD IN THE GAPS

What do we make of the idle moments in our day? The bits in between the bigger things?

 

We all have ways of filling these minutes. In the office, it’s a chance to pop outside for a shared cigarette break or to gather in the kitchenette, cold hands wrapped round hot mugs. At home, someone might knit or empty the bins. At the train station, skim the free newspaper’s headlines. But all this feels so twentieth century now. Today, one task has flattened every other into submission. We simply pick up the smartphone and browse.

 

Psychologists have described all these habits as microflow activities that help us navigate daily boredom. And not just boredom, but social awkwardness. These minutes between events can be embarrassing when no-one knows quite what to say. How much easier to focus on the smartphone instead, where there is an endless sequence of images and information to absorb limited time.

 

In any case, the culture positively affirms this decision. Successful people are supposed to fill every moment with meaningful choices; self-help articles and podcasts tell us how to make the most of each day. Smart people are focussed, driven, wasteless. Consider the way daydreaming is viewed. From school classrooms onwards, children are criticised for staring out of the window because no good can come of a wandering mind. It makes a curious contrast to the approval of smartphone use, as if the time we spend browsing the infinite quantity of indifferent material found online is better for us.

 

Jerome L Singer was a pioneer of daydreaming studies and he identified three kinds of mind wandering: the productive and creative; the guilty and obsessional; the endlessly distracted. In other words, daydreaming can be very good but we tend to view it only as a vice.

 

Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufmann believes daydreaming can support:

 

Self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reaction, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion.

 

I wish I’d had that retort when teachers told me off for daydreaming at school.

 

These small periods in each day, what author and academic Christine Rosen has called interstitial moments, are places occupied by the Holy Spirit, too. When we fill every minute with information, we make it harder for God to get through to us. He may choose to do this by the information we read, but the chances are he has something else to say. The still, small voice of God fits snugly into these brief spaces.

 

The apostle Peter, lying on the roof of a house in Joppa overlooking the sea, spent some interstitial moments feeling hungry and waiting for lunch to be prepared below while he prayed. It was dead time; the vape break outside the office. And in this brief window of time, God revealed to Peter that the entire world, not just Jewish people, were to receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From such a small, inconsequential moment emerged a vision which revolutionised the world.

 

There is a God in the gaps. How much more enriched might our spiritual lives be if we gave more attention to him rather than reaching for the easy stimulation of a wired world?