1440
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of – Benjamin Franklin.
1440. Maybe you know what that means. Maybe you don’t. 1440. It isn’t a small number but it is a massive one. So time I tell you. That’s if you don’t already know what 1440 means. It is the minutes in one day. It seems like a lot but as all of us can attest to they can slip by in what feels like seconds. And we can always find a use for them. But the one thing we can never ever do is get them back.
No matter how rich or poor you are the one resource we all have been given by God in equal measure is time. But as Thoreau once wrote we can kill time but in so doing injure eternity. For there are times we wish we never had or never were. God knew that though and allows us the chance to repent and let that time remain in the past, so it need not affect our present and leave us with a bleak future.
Some days are filled with sadness so great or times so troubled that it feels like those 1440 minutes will never end. You know what I mean because you like I have gone through those days, those minutes where the darkness is so great and so black.
But as Psalm 30:5 reminds us:
For His anger endureth but a moment; in His favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.
He shines like a beacon in that darkness and soon those dark times, those slow, agonising minutes, are replaced by times so great that we want time never to move from that time onward. Ah yes, the best times. The times that we wish we could hang onto forever. Times that are so enjoyable, and so precious, that we wish those moments would never end. Soon our sadness is gone, replaced by joy. But we should have never ever doubted that He would replace our gloom with happiness, with bubbles :-)
For Romans 8:28 says: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
Then there are the ordinary times. I like to think of these of good times that we just haven’t realised are good times right now. It is nice to have an ordinary day; a day of nothing. But to God no day, or minute is nothing. It is something. Special. Precious. 1440. Remember that number. 1440. Appreciate every single minute. All of them.
The seventh richest man in the world is Ingvar Kamprad. Who? Ikea. Ah, that’s who. The name came from his initials, IK, with an E for Elmtaryd, the family farm where he grew up, and an A for Agunnaryd, his home village. He started off with hardly anything but that one commodity we all have. 1440. He made the most of them, even divided his time into 6 minute blocks, ala lawyers and accountants, and then kept a diary of how he spent his time. He puts this attitude towards time as the key reason for his success for he knew the harder he worked, the more he would achieve and the more successful he would become. Not that he has ever lost sight of his humble beginnings, still liking to travel on the cheapest seats on the cheapest airlines and haggling over fruit and veg prices at the local markets. And those pictures you see are of he and his wife and their house. They look like any other old couple still in love with each other and isn’t that just great!
I notice that the people who complain the most about shortness of time are the ones who waste it. Who don’t realise that our time here is only a vapour. Nothing. So we have to make the most of it. We need to remember that we owe our time to Him, the one who has given us everything. We can choose any of the 1440 to start living more like Him, for Him. But that decision only belongs to each of us.
We are blessed enough to live in a great country called Australia where how we spend those 1440 minutes everyday is our decision. We can’t blame another person for how we spend our time. It is a gift from God that we have them in the first place. That is why it is called the present.
1440. God knows the value of time. Always has and always will. To be like Him we need to value time. Every minute of it. Even reading this post I hope that you have used your time wisely. Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes about the importance of time, of how everything has a time. Not a place. A time. 1440. Ecclesiastes is a lot about time. It's time I read it again.
Okay, it is time for me to stop writing. And for you to stop reading. And for both of us to go now and use the 1440 minutes we are given everyday to glorify His greatness for in so doing we will bring blessings and love and peace into our lives, and an attitude that values and makes the most of time. The time He has given each of us.
Thanks for reading and God Bless.
