Hello. My name is Richard, and I’m a curate in the Church of England, based in Maidstone, Kent. A curate is a bit like an apprentice vicar.

I believe my calling is to stir the affections of the hearts of those God has called me to serve towards the worship of Jesus.

We live with a lot of pressure—from social media, the news, work and school. There is pressure on our time, and pressure to be productive with it.

Time is set apart, not spent.

Many tools ask what you’re going to do with your time, treating it as a currency to spend or a commodity to use. Given for Wonder asks a different question: what if time were something to be received, and responded to, rather than managed?

Given for Wonder began with a simple realisation: I don’t initiate anything in my relationship with God. Everything I do is in response to who God is and what God has already done. There is a beautiful mystery in God’s ordering of things — grace comes first, and rest comes with it. Neither is earned.

In the creation account in the Bible, God creates humanity on the sixth day. The first full day of human life is a day of rest (Genesis 1:26–2:3). Yet rest is often something we relegate to the end, only to be taken once everything else is done. We compress it into the smallest space so that we have more time for the things on our to-do list.

I’m drawn to the rhythm of a day that begins in the evening: rest comes first (Genesis 1:5).

As a worship leader and songwriter, I love the language of music and rhythm. As one with ADHD, I often struggle with the language of productivity.

I love making bread. Good bread is not something you can hurry; it takes time. I love making pasta and rolling it out by hand. It doesn’t take a long time, but it’s a satisfying process. I love good paper and ink pens, fires and stillness. I love preparing a meal from scratch, or starting with a single note or an idea and taking the time to craft it into a song.

These are practices that help me to notice rather than hurry.

Very few people, at the end of life, wish they’d managed their tasks better. Far more carry a quiet grief about their relationship with time itself — that there wasn’t more of it, or that too much of the present was sacrificed for some future validation that never quite arrived.

Jesus told us to focus on the bread for now, not the future (Matthew 6:11, 34). There is something precious in this moment — this week — as it is.

Weekly Rhythm leaves waking time Open, while allowing a few Principal Intentions to give the week shape without defining everything that may happen within it.

I don’t want Given for Wonder to become another thing that has to be done. My prayer is that it would be a space to pause, to read, to listen and to reflect.

Given for Wonder has been born out of a desire that life might hold and inhabit time a little more gently, and a little more graciously.

My hope is that this project stays deliberately quiet. That it gives space for unintention.