Quiet Time or Sacrifice of Fools?

"To draw nigh to hear is better than to give the sacrifice of fools." Eccles. 5:1 (R.V.)
"There is no science in management." Prof. Mintzberg, Managerial Scientist

No science in management; no spirit in religion Mintzberg said "there is no science in management," yet he is a famous managerial scientist! But note carefully what he said. He did not say that management is not a science, but that there is no science in management. In the business classroom, there is science, but in the reality of the business battleground, the science is not used.

Why managers don't manage. Mintzberg's research found that the average American manager did 583 tasks a day, one every 48 seconds. There is no way to plan such a day; rather, the day plans him. He spends the entire day not planning but fighting fires, never pausing to wonder if some of the fires could not have been avoided, or delegated to others.

Managers don't manage. They're too wrapped up in busyness to be effective in business. The solution? As I teach my Organizational Behavior students at Xiamen University MBA Center, it takes time to save time. I teach them to do what I did when I was in business-to start each business day with a half hour appointment with myself to plan the day; otherwise the day plans me, and I never have enough time (odd, isn't it, how we hoard money, which can be lost and recovered, but squander time, which once gone can never be regained).

Daily Quiet Time If planning, priorities and direction are needful for business, how much more so for life in general. I am an extreme Typa A person, and my natural inclination is to rush into the day, but if I want to hit the day instead of it hitting me, I have to spend each morning in quiet time, reading the Word, and listening. Yet even in my QT I am type A, and easily spend more time talking than listening for that still small voice. But when I force myself to be still, and to think about what I've read, and to listen--I invariably find I am given lessons that carry me through that day.

What we Can take with us. We are here only a few decades, and when we leave the only thing we take with us is what we have learned. Today, I have specific lessons to learn, but during my so-called Quiet Time, I often spend more time talking than listening. With so much to learn from that still, small voice, surely to waste the time talking instead of listening is the sacrifice of fools.

F. B. Meyer, in "Our Daily Homily" (Morgan & Scott, London, 1894), writes of Eccles. 5:1, "To draw nigh to hear is better than to give the sacrifice of fools":

"This is certainly half of our business, when we kneel to pray. It is a drawing nigh to hear. One has truly said that the closet is not so much an oratory, in the narrow sense of making requests, as an observatory, from which we get new views of God, and new revelations of Him.

"We are all inclined to be rash with our mouth. We rush into the presence of God, leave our card as on a morning call, and then plunge into the eager rush of our life. We have spoken to Him, but not stayed to hear what He would say in reply. We have suggested many things to Him, but have not sought for his comments, or suggestions, in return. We do not take time to fix the heart's gaze on the unseen and eternal, or to abstract our mind from the voices of the world, so as to hear the still small voice that speaks in silence and solitude.

'Only the waters which in perfect stillness
lie
Give back an undistorted image of the
sky.'

"Keep your foot; take off the shoes from your feet. When entering the Presence-chamber, whether alone or with others. Walk warily and reverently; behold! He is near, before whom angels veil their faces with their wings....."

Note from Bill: Meyer then notes the earnest reverence of Mr. Gladstone, who would never forget an 'Amen!' at the appropriate time. A good man, I'm sure--but it would have been nice if Gladstone had applied his spirituality to his life, and ended Britain's century of gun-point opium trade in China, rather than applauding it as of benefit to China and India! Quiet Times are useless unless we apply what we are taught in private to the lives we live out in public. Otherwise, our quiet times are as devoid of true spirituality as modern management is often devoid of science.

Bill Brown
Xiamen University
www.amoymagic.com