Just a second...

James 4:13-15

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will[a] go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; 14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.”

In life time is one of the few commodities that God allows us to have some control over. Not much, but it is one of them.

So we can’t accuse or blame anyone else of wasting our time. It is we who allow our time to be wasted. As Lance Armstrong wrote in his book on cancer survival, every second counts.

But how we spend time is also a reflection of our priorities in life. One of my favourite sayings is never let the urgent stop the important but so often this happens to so many. I find it hard to prevent this from happening, but I do my best. If I make mistakes I want to make improvements, not excuses. To really make every second count.

For some work has become a priority that has no place other than no.1 in their lives. And those that don’t understand that are placed 2. And no one remembers who came second. So whilst these people are consumed by work and are consuming work everyone else who is just a second moves on.

Then one day the person who made work everything finds that work didn’t see it quite the same way, and then life changes. When they reach out to someone they find that they are no longer there because they got tired of being second. No one likes being just a second. And time is just too precious to spend being second.

There are so many ways we can spend time. As the US Declaration of Independence states, God has given us life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness. Sadly we give God second best all too often. I do. And I want to do more, be better with what I give back to Jesus. To not place Him second. To make Him more than just a second.

For it is better to give than to receive. And this includes our time. It is better to give our time to Him, to loving others, to reaching out to others. The time we spend every second of every day is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves, our priorities and our motivation. To God we are not just a second.

But one day we will be accountable for all of our seconds. We already are but some have not realised this yet. Never be just a second. Never let God become just a second. As Romans 12:9-11 says:

9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. 10 Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honour giving preference to one another; 11 not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord;

As Psalm 100 says I serve God with gladness. I am gracious for the time He has given me. I am gracious that He has made me more than just a second. I want to make Him more than just a second. I want to bless others by telling them about how great God is, and why He should be first not second in our lives.

Thanks for reading and God Bless.

1440

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.