Find Time

Find Time

Rev. Denn Guptill Bedford Community Church

Pussy cat, pussy cat where have you been?

“I have been to London to visit the queen”

Pussy cat, pussy cat what did you there?

“I frightened a little mouse right under her chair”

You ever think about it? Here is a cat that has been given probably the greatest opportunity of his life, the chance to see the queen. To enjoy all the privileges of meeting monarchy. Now I don’t know your opinion of the royal family but most of us are curious enough by nature to jump at a chance to meet Queen Elizabeth and all her children. So here is our here pussy cat, who for brevity sake we shall call p.c. P.c. has gone to London to see the queen and when he gets there from his commentary we discover that instead of making the most of the time he had with her he did a very common and instinctive thing. He chased a mouse right under her chair. Not a bad thing, not an evil thing, but given the circumstances probably not the best possible use that he could have given to his time. And yet I am sure that if you spoke to p.c. that he would tell you that right then that had seemed to be the thing that could be done. After all he was a cat and the mouse was a mouse and tradition, duty and obligation would say that there was indeed some urgency required if he was to catch the mouse.

And so the tyranny of the urgent took over and robbed p.c. of his entire purpose of going to see the queen. From his brief account of his visit this would appear to be the sum total what happened in his encounter with royalty. Not that he did anything wrong, but he sacrificed the best possible use of his time to satisfy his preconceived idea of the necessary.

I wonder this morning how many of us could testify to having wasted precious moments with the necessary when much greater opportunities lay at hand. Let me start with three premises that you may or may not agree with and that is your prerogative completely. The first thing is this; you will always find time to do the things that you want to do. You can believe that or not but at least think about it. When I was in Bible College I could never find time to study, I used to lament about there not being enough hours in the day, sound familiar? Right but I could always find time to take Angela out, or to go to a hockey game, or read a good book, or play monopoly with peter fuller, Jeff Turcotte and Allan Mullen until three o’clock in the morning. But there was never enough time to study.

The second thing is that you have the same twenty four hours in your day as everybody else, the same twenty four hours that Prime Minister Chrétien has in his day and he has a country to run. God doesn’t give some people thirty hour days and other people ten hour days, everyone of us gets twenty four hours in our day, and every hour has sixty minutes in it, and every minute has sixty seconds in it. We all get the same amount of time in our day, but each one of us will determine how we are going to spend those hours.

Somebody once said “we waste our time as if it were as worthless as money!” You can always make more money but when time is gone it’s gone forever.

The third is this you cannot make time. All you can do is find time. Time is already made and we can’t make any more of it. All we can do is prioritize how we use time. Each Monday morning I receive an email from Roy Williams who runs an ad agency in Texas, a few weeks ago this was the first part of that email. What would you create if you were given 250, 14-hour days to do it? Would you write a book or screenplay? Study a complex concept? Become fluent in a foreign language? Build a ship in a bottle? It’s been estimated that the average man will spend, in his lifetime, about 3,500 hours shaving. That’s 250, 14-hour days.

Did you ever notice that the only one of the Seven Dwarfs who shaved was Dopey? This ought to tell us something.

Each of us has ambitions, dreams and goals we would pursue "if only we had the time." But we do have the time. We’re just doing something else with it. Like shaving.”

Williams goes on to say: “When I’m on the road, the two questions I’m most often asked are,