How We Spend Our Time

I am still sharing from my lesson based on the book Growing Your Soul; Practical Ways to Increase Your Spirituality:

Time. I don’t know anyone – at least adults – who say they have enough. Yet supposedly Americans have more free time then ever before in history. People are obsessed with time. We’ve all read the articles where someone has figured out how many years we spend sleeping, how many waiting inline, how many sitting at a traffic light or on hold on the phone. Someone said the average person wastes enough hours in 1 decade to get a 4-year college degree. (Doesn’t that make you feel good!)

Time can be spent, but not bought, saved, but not stockpiled, given, but not loaned. It can be remembered, but not reversed. You can waste a lifetime, but you can’t create an extra hour. Time waits for no one and nobody really knows where it goes – it’s just – gone!

Ever feel stumped when your spouse comes in and says, “So, what did you do all day?”

We get angry if the car in front of us is going the speed limit, if the person in the grocery line in front of us writes a check – and then heaven forbid stop to enter the amount in her ledger here! Take the receipt home and do it where you’re not holding up the line!

We put in more time to earn more money to buy more things that we don’t need that require time to keep in good repair even though we aren’t using them!

Our compulsions with schedules and calendars make time our enemy. Busyness takes a toll on our emotions and spirit. Somehow – we need to make time our friend instead of our enemy.

Pastor Milo Arnold wrote, “Jesus didn’t need longer days nor extended years. He just took the time He had and fitted life into it so that His work was done when His time was gone.” Yet He always had time for people and spent much time alone with God. Jesus is a worthy model of effectiveness of time.

Gandhi said, “There is more to life then increasing its speed.”

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way it became a status symbol to be busy. The multi-taskers became people for us to emulate. And when that happened a lot of just plain good living was sacrificed.

God gave us Sundays off. Most of us don’t take them. Many of us though will skip the one thing He did tell us to do on Sunday so that we can “get more stuff done.”

We all have more control of our time then we think.

(to be continued tomorrow)