Numbered Days
How do you spend your money?
I once heard someone say that if you want to know what someone truly values, you need look no further than their bank statements. Whether we agree with that statement or not, I suspect we do agree that how we spend our money is important. It is vital indeed. Yet, I propose that another consideration is even more important:
How we spend our time.
No matter how much money we lose, there is at least a chance that we can recover it. Time, on the other hand, is a nonrenewable resource that—once lost—cannot be recovered. This reality makes me think of a verse from Psalm 90:
Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom (v. 12).
To number our days is to recognize the fleeting nature of this life; and living with such awareness positions us to gain a heart of wisdom. So I have another question for you:
How do you spend your time?
Perhaps more pointedly, do you spend your time like someone who is running out of it? Because the reality is, my friend, we all are running out of time. Our days are indeed numbered.
I know, I know, thinking about our mortality can seem depressing or even morbid. Yet as John Trapp once declared:
“To live with dying thoughts is the way to die with living comforts.”
When we live with an awareness of our limited time in this life, we’re less likely to have regrets when our time in this life ends.
As we approach the end of this year, it is a great time to take inventory of how we spend our time. Perhaps it is more accurate to think of it as investing our time. We all have the same 24 hours every day, so whenever we say, “I don’t have time for that,” what we really mean is, “I don’t want to invest my time into that.”
Sticking with this investment analogy, I’d like you to consider what kind of return on investment (ROI) you’re experiencing in the following scenarios:
1) What kind of ROI are you getting from how you invest your time in the mornings?
2) What kind of ROI are you getting from how you invest your time during the day?
3) What kind of ROI are you getting from how you invest your time in the evenings?
In other words, are you investing your time in ways that help promote, highlight, or grow only temporary realities or that help promote, highlight, or grow the eternal Kingdom of God?
Depending on our answers to these questions, we may need to create or adjust morning and evening routines, or we may need to give up TV or social media for a period of time, or we may need to start using a planner to get better organized. Whatever we need to do to be better stewards of this precious commodity called time, we should do it.
How we invest our time is our choice, so let’s choose wisely.
Your Sister-Friend,
Leah
P.S. If you feel as though you have already wasted a lot of time in your life, please don’t be discouraged. Even though we cannot recover lost time, our God can redeem lost time. He can do more in the time we have left than we ever could have imagined. So don’t use your past as a prison and get stuck in it; rather, use it as a classroom and learn from it. Ask God to show you how to make the most of the time you have left for His Kingdom and glory!
