The faster life spins, the tighter we grip. To keep your bearings, you have to fix your eyes on something that isn’t moving.
Whenever I take my kids to the park, I always envision myself sitting on a bench reading while the kids play contentedly. But any parent will tell you that is never how it actually goes. Somehow, I always end up running in literal circles, spinning my own children along with half a dozen other kids on the merry-go-round as fast as I can.
Sometimes I get carried away. The kids are yelling “faster!” so you better believe I’m going to deliver. But then comes the moment when I catch the eye of one of the kids, usually a smaller one who doesn’t belong to me. His joy has turned to panic. His little white knuckles are hanging on for dear life. His mom is screaming at me to stop while I laugh maniacally.
I’m kidding. I stop when they get scared.
The truth is, I feel like that kid sometimes. Maybe you do too. When the merry-go-round that is life starts spinning faster and faster, our grip gets tighter and tighter. And our natural tendency is to grip tighter to the things of this earth—more control, more money, more security. But what often gets lost in the vertigo of modern life is an eternal perspective.
The Wheel and the Line
The merry-go-round is an apt analogy for time, because that is precisely how many cultures have understood it. In this cyclical view, time is seen as a wheel, and everything comes back around to where it started. History is on repeat. We aren’t headed anywhere in particular, so you may as well hang on and enjoy the ride.
But Christians know that time is not a meaningless spinning wheel. In his classic book, Christ and Time, Oscar Cullmann observes that for the early church and biblical Judaism, the symbol for time wasn’t a circle but an upward-sloping line. God has a plan that He has been carrying out from the beginning and that will culminate in eternity. And we can have confidence in this plan because, in a sense, eternity has already broken into time in the person of Jesus Christ. All of our hopes are tied to His promises. He is the anchor that orients us, the purpose that moves us forward.
Fix Your Eyes
Most Christians would agree about the importance of an eternal perspective, at least on paper. But how does that shape your Tuesday?
Holding onto that perspective when the world is moving faster and faster, when notifications multiply, and busywork is piling up—that’s the real challenge. Our instinct under the pressure of acceleration is to grip more tightly to the things of earth. The consequence is that, by degrees, we become more and more earthly-minded.
So what is the antidote? How does anyone keep an eternal perspective while life is spinning at top speed?
You focus on something stationary.
Every kid who has spent time on a merry-go-round knows the trick to not getting dizzy: pick something that isn’t moving and stare at it. Dancers call the disciplined version of this spotting. You lock your gaze onto a fixed point each rotation. This stationary focal point lets the brain keep its bearings even as the body keeps turning.
This is precisely the prescription Scripture offers. We are to “fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen” (2 Corinthians 4:18). Not a glance. Not a one-and-done. Holding an eternal perspective is an ongoing, daily, deliberate recalibration. And more specifically, it is a person we fix our eyes on: “Looking to Jesus… who is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2). Not Jesus in the abstract, but the Jesus who is seated—enthroned in eternity, entirely outside the spin. He is the fixed point.
The more time I’ve spent thinking about time management, the more I’ve become convinced that an eternal perspective is the linchpin of the whole enterprise. Only an eternal perspective enables you to say no to the urgent without anxiety, absorb a hard season without panic, and order your hours by God’s values rather than the fears of the moment. Yet an eternal perspective is a slippery thing. It requires constant reorientation, and the best way to do this is to build genuine, heartfelt prayer into your schedule throughout the day.
I saw a kid on the merry-go-round once who had this whole thing figured out. While the others clung to the bars at the edge, desperately hanging on, he stood in the center, hands on his hips, eyes locked on a tree. He was spinning just as fast as everyone else, but he stood perfectly steady.
So before you reach for another app, another method, another color-coded calendar, ask the more fundamental time management question: Am I keeping my eyes fixed on Christ?
