by Andy Stanley
You reap what you sow. I reap what I sow. But wisdom is just as crucial for facing the consequences of your past life as it is for taking the next step or steps into the future. Our same question still applies though: What’s the wise thing for me to do? The answer in this case will be hopeful, but it will be a hope colored by scars and tears, a hope that’s weathered.
But that doesn’t make it any less a hope.
And there’s no better time to move toward hope, toward wisdom, than now, especially in the two areas we turn our attention to next.
When it comes to asking our question, there is no more crucial arena than that of time. Your time equals your life. You can run out of money and still have some life left. You can run out of friends with life to spare. But once you run out of time, it’s over.
If there is one commodity we must learn to handle wisely, it is our time. Think about it. You can make more money, make new friends, take more trips, maybe even have another child. But your allotment of time is inflexible. You only get so much of it. Job put it this way:
A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed. (Job 14:5)
Did you catch those last four words? “Limits he cannot exceed.” You can overspend, overeat, and overachieve, but you can’t “overlive.”
The psalmist adds this insight regarding the relationship between our allotment of time and wisdom:
Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)
I love that verse. Simply by recognizing that our days are numbered, we take a giant step toward becoming men and women of wisdom.
Just the sheer recognition that our time on this earth is limited should compel us to evaluate all of life differently. Unfortunately, we spend more of our lives asking for the time than evaluating how well we’re investing it. But as we are about to discover, there’s something far more significant than knowing what time it is: it’s knowing what to do with our time.
Which Way Did It Go?
Sandra and I were married for almost five years before we had our first child. When we think back to those days of child-free living, we often wonder, What in the world did we do with all that extra time? Shouldn’t we have something significant to show for those unencumbered years? Where did all that time go?
The answer: away.
It went away. And there is no way to recover a minute of it. There is no leftover time. It can’t be saved up for later. You can’t store it. It just goes away. So we all look back and wonder where the time went. It seems like just yesterday I was sixteen. Where did my twenties go? Why don’t I have more to show for my thirties?
When we ask, “Where did the time go?” we are really asking another, more bewildering, question: “Where did my life go?” You see, what we do with our time is more important than simply knowing what time it is, how old we are, or even how much time we have left. The fact that time is life and can’t be recovered is why we must place this priceless commodity under the scrutiny of our much bigger question:
In light of my past experience, my current responsibilities, and my future hopes and dreams, what is the wisest way to invest my time?
Now, we could end this chapter right here. You are smart enough to objectively evaluate your time commitments and make the necessary adjustments. And you have lived long enough to know that time is life. But before we move on, I would like to dig deeper into one aspect of time that so often eludes us. This is something everybody figures out eventually, but sometimes eventually is too late. This is one of those life lessons that, regardless of when we learn it, we wish we had learned it earlier.
Chipping Away
I will keep this simple because this is actually a very simple principle. I’ve broken it down into five statements. Here’s the first:
1. There is a cumulative value to investing small amounts of time in certain activities over a long period.
Exercise is an obvious illustration of this principle. There’s a clear cumulative effect from exercising a few minutes every day or every other day over a long period. At the end of a year, you can see and feel a difference. But at the end of your first exercise session, the only difference is that you are sore. You will see almost no measurable benefit from one exercise session; in fact, no matter how long you have been exercising, there is almost no measurable benefit from a single session. That’s why it is so easy to talk yourself out of exercising. What will it hurt if I miss one day? The answer is, it won’t hurt anything, physically speaking. The real value in exercise is not found in any one deposit of time; the value is realized at the end of a sequence of deposits. Exercise has a compounding effect. The consistent, incremental investment of time makes a difference.
The same is true if you are attempting to master a musical instrument or perfect your golf swing or gain proficiency in the martial arts. A little bit of concentrated effort several days a week over a period of six months will drastically improve your performance.
Now, what is obviously true in the realms of physical fitness and music is not so obvious in other areas. Nevertheless, it has implications for just about every facet of our lives, especially those pertaining to relationships. Let me list a few specific practices where consistency will make a difference: dinner with the family, date night with your spouse, time alone with God, church attendance, one-on-one time with your children, praying with your family, small-group Bible study, going to bed at the same time as your spouse.
There is no real measurable gain derived from any of these activities if you are keeping score based solely on any individual installment of time. What’s the takeaway from putting your kids to bed one Tuesday night? Occasionally, you might have a significant conversation with one of your children. Or a single evening of Bible study with a small group? On a good night, you might gain a new insight from someone in your small group. But for the most part, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if you did something else with that time. Dinner with the family is, well, it is dinner with the family. What is gained in one installment of time around the dinner table? Not much.
But as a father who kept the habit of eating dinner with his family five or six nights a week, I can tell you that there is cumulative value in that seemingly unimportant routine. As a Christian who was taught early on to open God’s Word alone every morning, I can vouch for the cumulative value of those incremental investments of time. And as a couple that has devoted three Monday nights a month to participating in a small group, Sandra and I know the cumulative value of being in community with a handful of other believers.
No specific dinnertime conversation comes to mind. I can’t think of a particular discussion with our small group that changed my life. Bedtime conversations with my children are rarely all that productive or memorable. But these routines, these incremental investments of time—life—have immeasurable cumulative value.
And that leads me to my second statement:
2. There are rarely immediate consequences for neglecting single installments of time in any arena of life.
Once again, it is in the realm of our health that we find the clearest example of this maxim. Neglect your health for a day and there are no immediate consequences. Neglect your health for a week and you won’t experience any negative effects. In fact, after a week of fast food, double desserts, no exercise, a few too many beers, and several late nights out on the town, you may wonder why you didn’t adopt this lifestyle earlier. (Or you may wonder why you gave it up!) If you were to evaluate the effects of such a lifestyle after a single week, you would probably draw some wrong conclusions. Other than a little indigestion and some difficulty getting up in the mornings, there wouldn’t seem to be anything to worry about.
This same dynamic plays itself out in every area of life. If you miss dinner with the family one night, it’s no big deal. If you choose to sleep in one Sunday morning, nothing changes. Skip work one Friday and you’ll probably still have a job on Monday. Pick up
a newspaper instead of your Bible one morning and life goes on. It’s deceiving but true that we rarely see any immediate consequences for neglecting a single installment of time in any arena of life. But if neglect becomes your pattern, you will eventually bump up against our third principle:
3. Neglect has a cumulative effect.
You can neglect your health for a week or maybe even a month without any serious consequences. But strap that lifestyle on for ten or twelve years and the damage might be irreversible. Not because of a single night out or one particular meal. The effect is cumulative.
Neglect has a cumulative effect physically, relationally, spiritually, professionally, financially, emotionally, and horticulturally. Horticulturally? I just looked out at my lawn. Neglect anything over a long period and you will have something to show for it. Usually a mess—a mess that can generate a wave of concern and even energy. Suddenly we realize what we have done, and we rush out to the yard to reverse the consequences of our neglect.
But in the areas that matter most, a burst of energy and activity cannot reverse the consequences that accompany a season of neglect. More on that a little later.
The next stop in our five-point journey is something you have probably never thought about but have certainly experienced. While it is true that small, consistent investments of time add up to good things and that consistent neglect adds up to bad things, the random pursuits that we allow to interrupt our important routines add up to no-thing:
4. There is no cumulative value to the urgent things we allow to interfere with the important things.
Allow me to illustrate. Let’s suppose your New Year’s resolution this past January was to exercise three days a week. You joined a health club. You bought a treadmill. You announced to friends and family that this would be your year to get in shape. Now let’s imagine that it hasn’t worked out. Other things kept interfering with your exercise routine. Chances are, you do not have to use much imagination on this one, but let’s take it a step further.
Now imagine that you have to sit down with a friend six months into the year and explain what you did instead of exercising. How might that conversation go?
“What did you do instead of exercising?” she asks.
“Um, I don’t know. A lot of things, I guess.”
“Well, let’s think about it. Did you sleep in a few mornings?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes I got a few extra hours of sleep.”
“Okay, how many times?”
“I don’t know.”
“What else did you do instead of exercising?”
“I went to the office early.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you do at the office?”
“Different stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“I can’t remember. Just stuff. Work stuff.”
“Okay. What else did you do with those mornings instead of exercise?
“On a couple of occasions, I had breakfast with friends.”
“What else?”
“Some mornings I just got up and piddled around the house. Checked my e-mail. Helped get the kids off to school.”
Here’s the point: If you stack up all the stuff you did instead of exercising, then added up their value, what would you end up with? Zero. The random pursuits that interrupt our important routines don’t add up to anything. Well, actually, they add up to a lot of wasted time. There’s never any cumulative value to all the things we do instead of the things we know are truly important.
What’s the cumulative value of all the things a college freshman does instead of studying? Zero. What’s the cumulative value of all the things a father does instead of having dinner with his family? Zero. What’s the cumulative value of all the things that have interfered with your devotional time? Zero.
When random urgent activities constantly interfere with strategic deposits of time, it is like throwing away our most precious commodity. It is worse than wasting time. We waste our lives.
This principle explains why we don’t have more to show for our time. It all gets gobbled up with random, unquantifiable activities—activities that rob us of what’s most important. When you add up all the what-I-did-instead-ofs, they always equal zero.
Before we dive into the fifth and final statement, let’s look at what we have said so far.
• There is a cumulative value to investing small amounts of time in certain activities over a long period.
• There are rarely any immediate consequences for neglecting single installments of time in any arena of life.
• Neglect has a cumulative effect.
• There is no cumulative value to the urgent things we allow to interfere with the important things.
If all of this is true, and time equals life, what is the wise thing to do as it relates to your time?
My fifth point is so important I’m dedicating the entire next chapter to it.
Surely you remember Eddie Money. Big pop star in the 1980s. Lots of hits. Very cool-looking guy. He usually appeared in still photos with a cigarette perched between his fingers. The reason I bring him up is that one of his biggest hits underscores the searing truth of our fifth and final statement about time. The song is titled “I Wanna Go Back.” The chorus goes like this:
I want go back and do it all over again,
but I can’t go back, I know.
Eddie’s right. We can’t go back. We can’t go back and relive, relove, retrieve, rearrange, reprioritize, redirect, or refocus. Looking back, there are times we wanna go back. But we can’t. You can’t relive your teens, twenties, or thirties. You can’t rewind your marriage. You can’t raise your kids again. Depressed yet?
Here’s my fifth and final statement concerning my principle for using time wisely:
5. In the critical arenas of life, you cannot make up for lost time.
As students, we could pull all-nighters to make up for the studying we should have been doing all week. On vacation you can drive a little faster than normal to make up the time lost during your four-year-old’s potty breaks. But in the world of relationships, there are no all-nighters. You can’t cram for a better relationship with your kids or your spouse. Speeding up doesn’t make up for lost time with your heavenly Father. The important areas of life require small deposits all along the way. And if you miss those opportunities, they are lost forever.
Most of us have made the mistake of trying to make up for missed time in the gym. You know what I’m talking about. You haven’t exercised in years; then suddenly you decide to get back into shape. So what do you do? The MEGA WORKOUT. You strap yourself into every machine in the building. You lift every weight. You log in time on the treadmill, the Lifecycle, the Stair-Master, the elliptical. You do it all. You know better, but something in you says, “I can make up for lost time; I can make up for my neglect.” And so you walk away convinced that you have reclaimed lost ground. You feel so toned, so in shape. You even consider running for governor.
But the next morning you can’t get out of bed. In fact, you are so sore you don’t go to the gym for a week. Or worse, you injure yourself and are out for even longer. The moral of the story is, you cannot make up for lost time in the areas of life that matter most.
So what is the wise thing to do now?
Dad, it won’t do any good to rush home tonight and announce to the family, “It just occurred to me that I’ve missed too many dinners with the fam. So load up! Tonight, we’re going to eat out at all our favorite restaurants. We’ll go till midnight or later if we have to. We’ll eat and eat and eat, and talk and talk and talk. We are making up for lost time.”
Ridiculous? Perhaps. But no more ridiculous than thinking a long vacation can make up for being an absentee parent. It is no more ridiculous than promising a romantic weekend getaway to make up for months of work-related travel. A weekend together can’t rescue a marriage that’s been neglected for six months or more—no matt
er how romantic you make it.
Relationships are built on small, consistent deposits of time. You can’t cram for what’s most important. If you want to connect with your kids, you’ve got to be available consistently, not randomly. A vacation or weekend getaway is a good way to commemorate or celebrate the past or even changes on the horizon. But neither can compensate for consistent neglect.
So once again, what is the wise thing for you to do?
Redeeming the Time
With these five statements as a backdrop, look once again at Paul’s warning to the believers in Ephesus:
Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. (Ephesians 5:15–16)
The phrase “making the most of every opportunity” is often translated “making the most of your time”; it’s literally “redeeming the time.” The Greek term used here is an accounting term. Paul was saying, “Get the full value out of your time—squeeze all the good you can out of every moment of your life.” Misappropriated time is misappropriated life. Be wise. Make the most of your time. You can’t go back and reinvest it.
Did you catch the reason Paul gave for redeeming the time? “Because the days are evil.”
As we said earlier, we don’t live in a morally or ethically neutral environment. As a follower of Christ, your values are constantly being challenged—challenged by another value system. If you aren’t on your guard, the culture will draw you into a lifestyle where your time is frivolously consumed rather than strategically invested. You will be busy. You may even be productive. But if you are not being “careful,” you will miss those irretrievable opportunities to make small, incremental time deposits in the things that matter most. If you are not walking wisely, your time will be fragmented by a thousand urgent, disconnected opportunities and events. Such opportunities and events will seem important at the time, but when strung together they have no cumulative value.