What if God gave you the power to stop time once a week? Not a metaphor, not a wishful prayer, but a real pause button. The whole world would freeze in place; conversations caught mid-word, birds hovering mid-flight, waves locked in mid-crest. You alone would remain moving, awake, alive.

What would you do with it?

At first glance, it feels like an easy answer: I’d use it for good. I’d serve quietly without being noticed, the way Scripture encourages, “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Maybe I’d fix something before it breaks, pick up where someone forgot, or make life a little lighter for the people I love.

But if I’m honest, the temptation would be to use it for escape. To rest when I don’t feel like I can keep up. To avoid the hard conversations that tie my stomach in knots. To let the deadlines wait while I take a long nap or a long run. The pause button would whisper, you can hide here a while.

And isn’t that exactly what I already do? Not with time stopped, but with the small pauses I steal each day. I scroll on my phone, stand too long in the kitchen, or add “just one more mile” when I don’t want to go home to the weight of life. The truth is, if I had that button, I’d probably be tempted to live inside it. And maybe that’s the point: how I’d use it reveals who I already am.

The pause could be holy. Imagine stepping into stillness not to escape, but to pray. No interruptions. No rush. Just me and God in a quiet world. That kind of pause wouldn’t be an escape; it would be an altar. It would be like Moses climbing Sinai, or Jesus slipping away to the lonely places. A pause to remember Who is in control. Not me, not my problems, not my exhaustion.

But the pause could also become a trap. Because control is intoxicating. To hold the world still is to feel like you own it. And the more you bend the pause to your will, the more it bends you in return.

Here’s the question that lingers: if I dream more about escape than service, about hiding more than helping, then maybe it’s not the pause button that needs to change… maybe it’s me. Maybe the gift isn’t in freezing time, but in learning to live faithfully in the time I already have.

We don’t get a button to stop time. But we do get moments, real pauses, scattered throughout the day. A quiet mile on the road. A verse read slowly instead of skimmed. A breath between one task and the next. Maybe those little pauses are already the gift, a way to meet God in stillness without trying to control the world around us.

So the better question isn’t what would I do if time stopped once a week?

The better question is what am I doing with the pauses I already have?