You Can’t Find More Time But You Can Make Better Choices

Dear friends and Jesus followers,

You often say you don’t have enough. It’s hard to manage. There are four trillion things left to do, it’s already dinner time and you are running out of that sacred measurement – time.

Here are the numbers.

There are 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, around 720 hours in a month, and 8,760 hours in a year.

Let’s do it this way.

If you work a 40 hour week and sleep 8 hours a night, you still have 72 hours a week to delegate. If you work 40 hours and sleep only 7 hours, you have 79 hours. For all of you 50 hour per week workers, you can sleep 8 hours and still have 62 hours up for grabs!

Look, I get it. You know the numbers. And such knowledge doesn’t make life less busy.

We live in 21^st century America, after all, and there’s a thing or two fighting to grab those remaining 72 hours.

But here’s what I want you to know, friends.

How you spend your minutes is a response to the choices you make.

I choose to work, therefore a lot of my time goes into my work. I choose to attend church regularly, therefore a few hours of my week are dedicated to that. I choose to have a home with a yard, so upkeep of that yard requires my time. I choose to not live like a slob, which results in a portion of my time dedicated to tidying up the house. I choose to have children, therefore I spend a significant amount of my time bathing, playing Apples to Apples, jumping on the trampoline, changing diapers, reading books, throwing balls and occasionally pulling my hair out. You get the idea.

Our daily routines, our families, our work, our homes— they require mucho time…o?

You know what else requires time?

Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat, web surfing, Netflix, wondering around stores grabbing those not-on-the-list items, planning your dream home on Pinterest and checking your e-mail ten times.

Tom Corley, author of Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, says this: “When we invest our time in anything it’s lost forever…When you see time as the greatest risk of all, it will force you to become more aware of exactly how to invest your time.”

The OUCH you hear is me stepping on my toes. These are hard words, ay?

When I look back over my life, there are many minutes I would like to revive. But that’s not how time works.

Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days so that our heart may grow in wisdom.” The Lord cares about how we steward our time, I believe. And too often, we’re guilty of approaching time passively, allowing it to control us, rather than steering that bull in the direction we’d like it to go.

If every minute you spend is a response to a choice you make, we have a choice to give our time to our priorities. So, here’s my challenge to you. Write down your priorities.

You know what that might result in? It might result in saying goodbye to a few things so you can say hello to more rest. It might result in cutting back on your favorite Netflix series to make more room for family. It might result in deleting your Twitter app to spend some time on your Bible app. (Did he just say that out loud? Why, yes. Yes I did.) It might result in saying no to guys night so you can say yes to date night with your spouse.

Unless you’re a cat, you have one life. And we all know cats are a result of the Fall, so who wants to be one of those anyway? You have 24 hours a day. 168 hours a week. 8,760 hours a year. That’s it.

I challenge you to be intentional about the way you choose to spend them.

Grace and peace, friends.