During the horrendous first weekend of last November as New Life Church in Colorado Springs reeled from the sudden fall of its senior pastor, Ted Haggard, one of the church’s associate pastors, Rob Brendle, kept offering a strange line to the hundreds of reporters who had descended upon the church: “We’re expe-riencing this in real time,” he said.

In response to endless questions— about what Haggard did or did not do, what the church would or would not do, what the situation did and did not mean— the phrase was an apology and an expla-nation, a way of saying “I’m not sure what to say.” Brendle was reminding the media that because he and the church were as shocked by the sex-and-drugs allegations as anyone else, he didn’t have a series of prepackaged sound bites cooked up for audience consumption. All he had were partial, unrehearsed responses to raw experience, minute after minute.

The phrase has haunted me, and not just because I lived through that week-end with Brendle and the rest of the staff and members of New Life Church. Brendle’s words stuck because they are so tragically ironic. It is impossible to live in something less than “real” time, but today we think we do.

Don’t we? Doesn’t time seem less “real” today, just like “reality” a few years ago? First, technology promised virtual reali-ties. Then, movies like The Matrix and its many clones (no pun intended) told us that our reality was already eerily virtual, and it was up to us to choose the real.

Today, time can seem virtual, too. More than in any other age, we are faced with two enemies of real time—control and distraction. We assume we’re in control of it, and we let ourselves be distracted from it.

For example, at New Life Church before the fall we had been convinced we were in control of real time. But we were accustomed to a life that was predictable and devoid of danger. Then came November, when real time reminded everyone of real struggle and we were forced to acknowl-edge we were not in control.

All of us also miss real time when we’re not careful about how we use the time we’re given. I don’t mean just being busy; I mean being unaware of how we’re busy. Here’s a small example: this after-noon, I’ve had to work on a certain column for YouthWorker Journal. The time I’ve spent filling white space with the text you’re reading now has been like what I think of as real time. I have felt almost every second.

 Yet I am susceptible to temptations of distraction while writing. I suffer from “continuous partial attention” (a phrase coined by Microsoft’s Linda Stone and popularized by writer Thomas Friedman to describe having a primary focus, such as on the computer screen, while simultaneously monitoring other things, like your cell phone, your mp3 player and the TV). My Web browser history shows a trail of pages from Beliefnet’s blogs to ESPN’s baseball section. My iChat program has four conversations open. My iTunes feeds Bob Dylan and Wilco into my ears.

In these moments of distraction, time is no less real, perhaps, but much less experienced so that it feels less real. 

 To be exact, everything we experience, we experience in real time. There’s no halting the march of seconds, nor our presence in those seconds. But just as we can choose to enter into realities that are virtual—fabrications of technology only by degrees connected to our physical, spiritual, and communal selves— we can also choose to experience time as virtual-bled dry of awareness, crammed with activity. In letting time pass on thoughtlessly, we miss time completely.

 Patton Dodd is an editor for beliefnet.com