From Saving And Managing To Redeeming Time

FROM SAVING AND MANAGING TO REDEEMING TIME

In a lifetime the average North American will spend:

Six months sitting at stoplights

Eight months opening junk mail

One year looking for misplaced objects

2 years unsuccessfully returning phone calls

5 years waiting in line

6 years eating

21 years watching television.

An article was once published entitled, “If You Are 35, You Have 500 Days To Live.” The article went on to contend that when you subtract the time you spend sleeping, working, tending to personal matters, eating, traveling, doing chores, attending to personal hygiene, and add in the miscellaneous time stealers, in the next 36 years you will have only 500 days to spend as you wish. Think about how you spend your time. When all of the necessary things are done, how much time is left?

A poet puts it this way:

Just a tiny little minute

Only sixty seconds in it.

Forced upon me. Can’t refuse it.

Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,

I must suffer if I lose it,

Give account if I abuse it.

Just a tiny little minute,

But eternity is in it.

God did not give all of us the same amount of talent, nor the same amount of wealth, but He has given each of us the same amount of time.

Imagine that a bank credits your account each morning with $86,400. No balance is carried over from day to day. Any balance is deleted each evening. What would you do when you knew that you would not use all your daily balance? Why, withdraw every penny, of course!

You have such a bank and so have I. The name of our bank is TIME. Every day we are credited with 86,400 seconds. Every night, that which we have not used is debited from our account. TIME bank allows no overdraft, there is no going back for a second chance. TIME bank does not allow borrowing from tomorrow and of course, and there are no leftovers. The clock ticks away, never waiting for anyone to catch up.

Time is money we say. I recently saw these statistics for a person who makes $25,000 per year working 40 hours per week. Each second is worth .2135, each hour worth 12.81. If he wasted one hour per day in a year those wasted hours would be worth $3,125. If he wasted one hour per day for 30 years those hours would be worth $93,750!

But, in reality, time is not money. If you lose money, you can always make it some other way. Time is not a renewable resource. Whatever time we lost is gone forever, never to be returned to us again. Time is infinitely more valuable than money ever will be.

All of us realize the value of time.

How do we value ONE YEAR? Ask a student who failed a grade.

What is the value of ONE MONTH? Ask a Mother whose baby arrived prematurely.

How much do we value ONE WEEK? For the sailors trapped in a submarine on the ocean floor it was the difference between life and death.

How much do we value ONE HOUR? Ask someone who missed a connecting flight because the first flight was delayed by an hour.

What is the value of HALF AN HOUR? Ask the parents of the flower girl and ring bearer who missed the wedding here yesterday because one of them thought the wedding was at 4:30, rather than 4 pm?

How much do we value ONE MINUTE? Ask someone who had a heart attack in a restaurant with a paramedic sitting at the next table.

How much do we value ONE SECOND? Ask an Olympic swimmer, who just missed qualifying by 3 one-thousandths of a second!

Because we value time so much, we usually try to SAVE it & MANAGE it.

We save time by using microwaves and automatic dishwashers. We save time by taking non-stop flights, paying others to do our yard work, housecleaning or snow removal, going to the bank or the grocery store at non-peak hours, taking shortcuts, ordering through catalogues, shopping online rather than standing in line, and in a host of other ways. John Cornelisse caught me saving time the other day when I passed him on the Lewvan and he was already doing 10 km over the posted speed limit!

Some people take time-saving to ridiculous extremes. I am told that an American funeral company has come up with a plan for those who are too busy to come inside the funeral chapel to either view the deceased or to attend the funeral service. Their proposal is to install a drive-through viewing window “for people who don’t have the time to bid farewell inside.” The funeral director said: “People are too busy these days with work. This is just one way of making it easier for them.”