Time is a terrible...

...thing to waste

I’ve been away from this page for a while.

There are several reasons. One is that I tried and tried to write something about a fairly well-covered national event but I could never tie the threads together to make my argument. Even now, my thoughts on the subject don’t coalesce. That means I won’t subject anyone to a half-baked idea.

(Inner voice heckles): “When did you ever let that stop you?”

Thanks, inner voice. I can always count on you to keep me humble.

The other reason was that I had other, more important, things to write, like a tribute to my brother. Nothing else really seemed to matter.

Finally, I worry sometimes that I can get too kvetchy. If you don’t know what kvetchy is, you can just chalk it up to me wanting to avoid becoming the “get off my lawn” type of writer. Who needs to hear some guy complain all the time? If I want that, I’ll park on X for an hour and then go take a shower.

See? There’s a kvetchy sentence right there. Sorry, X followers, all is forgiven.

For now.

I’d rather not waste my time or yours, which brings me to the subject.

Waste.

Don’t do it.

The older I get, the more I think about time. That’s no surprise; time is a limited commodity, and we don’t know how much we really have.

One thing about my now-passed brother is that he never wasted time. That will happen when you nearly die at the age of 16. You treat every day after that as a gift, which is the only attitude to have.

It causes me to assess my efforts to use whatever time God has given me to the utmost effectiveness. I fear I can easily fall into complacency or just plain laziness. Then I look back (like many people do) and regret the undone thing, the unspoken word or the lost opportunity.

I’d rather not do that anymore. I’d rather run the race set before me - as the Apostle Paul once wrote - and finish with the prize, hearing the words from Jesus, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

There are people I need to talk to, see in person and tell them I love them and that God does, too. I won’t say I need to do that because saying I “need” to do something gives me an out. I “need” to do a lot of things, but doing them is what matters.

I was teaching on a Bible passage recently. It detailed the work of the Apostle Paul as he and his colleagues were proclaiming the gospel in the eastern Mediterranean region.

They went from town to town and each time they spoke about who Jesus is, they got run out of town or worse. This repeated itself many times.

But then, in a passage that’s so brief you kind of skip over it, we read that after all that opposition, they went back to those towns to encourage the new faithful people they had preached to weeks or months before.

In other words, even though they were reviled, beaten, marginalized and run out of town on a rail, they never gave up. All those opponents won the battle, but they lost the war because each town had a group of people who believed what Paul had to say and acted on it.

Perseverance. Or, to be more clear, not wasting time or effort.

These people had a mission, a purpose and a goal. And nothing was going to stop them. Surrender was not in their vocabulary; neither was waste. Not of time, not of effort, not of anything.

None of us can take back the things we’ve wasted in the past. But we can commit to never wasting the future.

There are sunrises to admire, children to be loved, hurting people to be encouraged, songs to be written, loves to be consummated and so much more that life presents even to the lowest among us.

Don’t waste. There are ideas to take shape, horizons to be conquered and people to be held tight.

Do it. Before it’s too late.