Time

"Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." - Psalm 90:12.  That has always been a verse I have kept close to my heart.  It is one that I think about daily, especially as I walk out the door each morning.  Often I sit in reflection of my day and wonder if I fulfilled the purposes God set before me.  Time is the raw material of everything. With time, all is possible.  Without it, nothing is possible.  The time we receive each day is truly a miracle.  We wake up each morning with the gift of twenty-four hours of an undetermined, unmanufactured substance that shapes the world.  It is like putty in our hands, given as a platform by and on which we mold the calling and will of God for our lives.  It is our most precious possession - one that cannot be stolen from us.  It alone is ours to waste.

Time, it is said, is God's gift and way of keeping everything from happening at once.  It is the filmstrip in which dreams, passion, and goals play out.  Yet, we can squander this precious treasure.   We can spend time foolishly or we can spend it wisely.  We either learn to master our minutes or they enslave us.  We either use time or it uses us.  Time is wasted in minutes, not years.  Everyone notices the bucket of water that is kicked over in an accident.  What a huge mess!  But the small leak that subtly empties the bucket is often left unchecked.  Either way, the bucket is emptied. 

A day to the Lord is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day.  An eternal God doesn't want us to waste our time.  Each moment He gives us is a precious gift.  Who among us would willingly waste the next six months sitting at a stoplight?  Who would spend the next year on the phone on hold?  What about three months opening useless junk mail?  Over the course of a lifetime this is the average.  We must make life count.  It begins with effectively managing the twenty-four hours we wake up to each day.  If we cannot learn to arrange that we inevitably will waste a lifetime.  Teach us Lord to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.