The God of Quality Time

Wasting time as love

God’s multiplied graces upon your week, friend and fellow! Alas, delivered to you this Thursday morning is the next installment of my Relational Genius of Jesus series, which has (up to now) examined the boundaries of Jesus, his enjoyment of people, his truth-telling, and the emotional vulnerability he models. Here, though, we are going to explore how Jesus showed his love to his disciples by sharing quality time with them. I’m surprisingly fond of this piece—as you may pick up. So enjoy. Also, make sure to stick around to the end of today’s post for a fun announcement. Go in peace.

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“After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There, he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.” (Mt. 17:1-3)

The timeless story of the Transfiguration, narrated in three of the four Gospels (Mt. 17:1-8; Mk. 9:2-8; Lk. 9:28-36), has captivated the hearts, minds, and imaginations of Christians for two thousand years. Bringing three of his closest friends up a mountain, Jesus offers them an experience of unparalleled intimacy. The carpenter reveals his glory to them; his face “shone like the sun...his clothes became as white as the light” (v. 2). All the while, two ancient prophets, Moses and Elijah, show up in conversation with Jesus.

Peter speaks up: “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” (v. 4). Peter wishes to worship Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. Then came a white cloud, enveloping them, from which the voice thunders: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him, I am well pleased. Listen to him!” (v. 5). Naturally, the disciples are terrified, collapsing to the ground. Only then does Jesus touch them, instruct them to stand erect, and be not afraid. By the time they do, Moses and Elijah have disappeared. Only Jesus, it seems, is left before them. And, by extension, he’s the only One to be worshiped. Soon thereafter, Jesus descends the mountain with his friends, where they find a father pleading for his son’s demonic traveler to be exorcised (v. 14-18).

What does this teach us about the relational genius of Jesus—and the community he is forming?

I remember reading Gary Chapman’s classic text, The Five Love Languages, years ago in preparation for my own marriage. Within, the counselor and marriage therapist outline what he believes are the five primary means people receive and express love: words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, physical touch, and quality time.¹ The concept of the love languages was refreshingly helpful for me at the time, even as it exposed my own selfishness. In my new marriage, I soon discovered that I had a bottomless need for words of affirmation—so much so that quality time was almost irrelevant. But I had married someone whose love language was quality time. She needed unstructured, unguided time of togetherness. In fact, words of affirmation meant little to her. I learned a challenging but essential lesson very early on: a marriage can’t thrive if you only love your spouse the way you need to be loved. Sacrificial love meant loving the other how they needed to be loved.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

As I’ve learned to embrace the art of quality time in a marriage, it’s become clear to me that this particular love language can be the one to have the most lasting systemic blessings on any relationship—particularly in marriage and parenting. Quality time is the thing that makes space for self-disclosure. As a husband and father, I cannot expect to sit down once a month for five minutes and ask, “how are you doing?” expecting to enjoy a relationship of intimacy, trust, and transformation. Most, if not all, the moments of profound revelation that come out in a relationship come when you don’t ask for it during long, protracted periods of wasted presence together. Intimacy rarely fits our schedule or timetable.

Similarly, God, like wisdom, isn’t someone who simply falls for our best pickup lines. Wisdom must be pursued, sought, and gone after over long periods of time for her to hand out her most prized treasures. Similarly, God must be sought with our time and energy even when it seems like a waste. That is worship. But what we see in the Transfiguration story—and the Gospels throughout—is that God bestows humans the gift of quality time. God spends time with us directly, alone, intimately. The word “by themselves” in the Transfiguration story has added weight to it. In a creation where God could go and be anywhere, God stoops down to give them his full attention.

And he does the same with us.

One of the dynamics of the Transfiguration story that causes me to pause and reflect is that as they descend the mountain, they find an oppressed boy in deep need of help. Meaning that while they were up there on the mountain experiencing quality time, there were many (countless, really) crises down at the bottom of the mountain that they were not attending to while they shared this quality time together on the mountain. I remember years ago reading a book by a somewhat cynical, angsty Christian who sought to convince his reader that modern-day church services were really unnecessary. We should, he argued, stop gathering to sing and instead go out and give that hour to serving our cities. In his mind, like Judas, worship was a waste that got in the way of the “real” work of Christianity.

For a while, I was sympathetic. But I soon saw through the charade. Over time, this kind of perspective toward time has disastrous effects on the life of the Christian. It demands that one bend their lives, hearts, and affections toward the needs of the world rather than the presence of God. We get better at “doing stuff” or “doing church” rather than be with God. This happens on both the left and the right. As spiritual formation luminary David Howard would write:

So, too, in many of our evangelical subcultures we become so obsessed with “doing church” right that we squeeze any life of the Spirit out of our churches. We become so worried that we won't have read the latest Barna poll, the most recent Willow Creek leadership materials, or the latest Sunday School materials from our denominational presses that we spend all our time reading secondary literature and surfing the Internet for the latest in church-related materials. We end up reading the Bible in a very cursory fashion, or not at all. We end up not spending quality time in prayer, and not listening to God in quiet meditation. We end up missing the presence of the Spirit in our lives-indeed, sometimes even quenching him.²

Still, in a way, worship is a profound waste of time. Years ago, the brilliant theologian Marva Dawn wrote an entire book arguing that in a world obsessed and drunk on efficiency, activism, and pragmatics, it could simply hold no logical category for the idea of just spending long, protracted periods with God that doesn’t accomplish stuff. Dawn brilliantly writes, “To worship the LORD is—in the world's eyes—a waste of time. It is, indeed, a royal waste of time, but a waste nonetheless. By engaging in it, we don’t accomplish anything useful in our society’s terms.”³ But we do experience God! Indeed, in a world that screams “just do something” or “be better,” there’s simply no logical category for wasted, quality time with God. Faith, in this insanity, is only good if it’s doing something. But can we really do much about the problems of the world if we don’t tackle them having heard from the heart of God?⁴ It is critical we demolish the demonic myth that wasted time together with God is an enemy to being on mission for God. These can’t be divorced.

Jesus shows us a different way. There are always crises brewing at the bottom of the mountain. And we will, indeed, get to those in due course. But unless we have first spent quality time with Jesus, then we will have no power out of which we can actually deal with the problems. In a funny way, the Transfiguration also teaches us the brilliant lesson that in the community Christ is forming, we must learn to get out of the way from time to time. Moses and Elijah disappear once they become a distraction. Is there a more timely expression of holiness for our enmeshed human existences than this? Part of a healthy community shaped by the Transfiguration is that we know when to get out of the way. Holiness, for those two ancients, was knowing the art of holy disappearance. Embracing quality time assumes our capacity to know our God-given limits.

Still, that Jesus—on his way to the cross, with crises swirling below, and endless needs to meet—believed that quality time with his disciples was not only needed but essential to a life well-lived, should give us pause. Humans need more than visits and calls and check-ins (as important as they may be). Humans need long, protracted periods of wasted time with the Lover of their soul. Or, if we were to take our words more seriously, we might begin to see that we have a word for wasting time with someone—love. In this Kingdom, we might say, wasted time is quality time.

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Thanks for reading. You can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. Also, it’s a joy to share the cover for my next book (Kudos, Zondervan) entitled A Teachable Spirit coming out at the end of April 2025. The book is an exploration of how and why followers of Jesus can and should be the most teachable learners the world has ever seen. And moreover, that we should have the hunger to learn from strangers, enemies, experts, parents, children, and many other surprising places. I just found out that Barnes & Noble is giving out a 25% discount on all pre-orders of the book through Friday, Feb. 7th (tomorrow). Feel free to get that discount here or pre-order wherever books are sold.

1. Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2009).

2. Howard, David M., “‘Surprised by Joy’: Joy in the Christian Life and in Christian Scholarship,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 47, no. 1 (March 2004): 15.

3. Marva Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 1.

4. My friends Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw write a little about this in their forthcoming book. They point out the intimate connection in the Gospels between “being” with Jesus and “doing” for Jesus. “Because they had spent time with Jesus,” they write, “they knew his heart for people, and they felt the freedom to act in the authority he had given them.” Holsclaw, Geoff and Holsclaw, Cyd, Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science and Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Refresh, 2025), 106.