In this excerpt from Chapter 9—”In Love with Time”—the author identifies the final toxin of the suburbs and the eighth practice that reconnects us to a thicker life…

“Sex was so much better before I was married.”

It was a girlfriends’ weekend in the city. My wife and several friends were enjoying a nice dinner sans kids and husbands. The evening conversation began with a general discussion about kids and then narrowed into how young kids are today when you have to talk with them about sex. And then one of the women just muttered it under her breath, and the conversation caught fire: “It’s like mopping the floor, something you gotta do.”

A few days after the weekend, my wife told me about the conversation, and I vacillated between prurient interest (What did the others say?) and trepidation (What did Jana say?). The gist of the evening’s topic was that sex simply doesn’t happen much in married life. Or it happens, but it really isn’t convenient. Jana’s editorial comment later was that I should feel lucky.

God’s gift to married folk seems more like work than it does play. In a schedule-oriented world, “Make love, not war” has become “Make the soccer game on time, not love.” The soccer and baseball games and swim meets fill the family calendar, and we never miss one. Making love, at least for married folk, has no immortality symbol attached to it, so why put it on the calendar? Sex is an intruder in a schedule-oriented world.

When my oldest was seven, he and I were headed out the door to a movie when he asked, “Do you play? Do you play when you’re an adult?”

I almost gasped at the force of his comment. “Do you think I play?” I asked. Christian didn’t say a thing. We walked to the car in silence.

The answer to the efficient, play-deprived suburban life is not necessarily more sex (although I wouldn’t argue with that). The answer isn’t better boundaries or more aggressive personal goals—practical how-to solutions. At some point, they may provide some help, but the real issue cannot be addressed directly. I shuck one responsibility only to pick up another: the church really needs me this year, and it feels good to be needed. I hear what the preacher says about using my gifts and talents in the church, but the message enervates me. Suburban religion, its programming, and the need for warm bodies to “advance the kingdom of God” seem only to contribute to my problem. It seems like more stuff to feel guilty about.

My religious tradition doesn’t say much about my overindulged lifestyle, or if it does, I can’t hear what it has to say. It is big on no sex before marriage (the Seventh Commandment), which does a decent job of making the community feel a modicum of guilt. For the life of me, though, I can’t remember a single sermon on the Fourth Commandment, to keep one day holy. Perhaps I’m suppressing or repressing all those sermons (something I’ve been known to do). There seems to be little residual community consciousness about the Seventh Day, other than a few leftover blue laws—no purchasing alcohol on Sunday, for example, until after noon. We’ve come a long way since the “no Sunday” contract that my wife’s uncle signed in 1945 when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He recalls, “I believed that you shouldn’t work on Sundays. He refused to pitch on the Lord’s Day, and his stance didn’t seem to surprise many.

The real answer to the craziness of my schedule-oriented culture is to view time differently.

(Excerpted from Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul. To purchase the book for your small group or book club, visit Amazon.com.)