"An extreme optimist jumped from the top of a skyscraper. As he sailed past the balconies on his way down he told the astonished onlookers, “Everything’s OK so far!”
That optimist gives us a humorous picture of what is actually the tragic way many people think about life. They live in a world of blind optimism because of an extremely short term focus in life. They are enjoying the swift lifestyle, but not considering the imminent crash that lies just a few seconds ahead.
As you consider how you will spend your time today, be sure to factor in the eternal consequences of what you choose to do. Compared to eternity, this life is simply a flash of time followed by the certainty of death and the reality of life after death. When our plans only focus on the trip down, we miss what should be our obvious frame of reference, and we make decisions we may regret for all eternity.
Remember, preparing for what happens after the crash redeems the time.
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"A few years ago, I had a house with two water supplies. I had a well and pump which provided free water and, as a back-up, a connection to a neighbor’s water, which I could use for $1 per day.
One day my pump failed. It was a busy day so I thought, “I’m not going to mess with that pump today just to save one dollar. I’ll use my neighbor’s water.” So I opened the valve. But the next day was also busy and I thought, “I’m not going to mess with that pump today. My time is worth much more than one dollar.” The process repeated itself for the next few days until I forgot about the pump until two months had gone by and I now owed $60, the shock of which caused me to fix the pump, a simple job, which only took a few minutes.
God wants us to be wise, and part of wisdom is overcoming procrastination by recognizing its accumulating consequences and redeeming the time.
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"Maybe you heard about the two-seater plane that crashed in a graveyard. Rescuers recovered 300 bodies.
Some recovery efforts make more sense than others. The ones that make the least sense from a time management perspective are the ones that never should have happened in the first place. They’re the ones that come from a lack of preventive maintenance. We don’t take two minutes to get safety goggles and we loose two weeks of work recovering from an injury. We don’t give 5 minutes to signing and mailing the important paper from the tax collector and we spend a week preparing for an audit.
Recovery efforts carry a heavy price tag in time and money. Prevention on the other hand is generally fast and cheap. That’s why God’s Word encourages us to think ahead. He wants us to foresee consequences, in this life and the next, so we’ll practice prevention and redeem the time.
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"A man answered his door at 3 in the morning to find a man standing in the rain asking him for a push. When he refused and returned to bed, his wife scolded him for refusing to help the stranded man, reminding him that someone had recently helped him when his car was stuck.
The shamed husband reluctantly did as he was told walking out into the pouring rain and yelling, “OK. I’ll give you a push. Where are you?” A voice from the dark replied, “Over here on the swing.”
The husband learned that night that not every request for help demands our immediate attention. As Christians, we want to maintain a good testimony by being sensitive to those in need. But we also have to remember to sort out what requests for our time will produce the greatest results for the Kingdom of God.
There are no unimportant people. But there are important people who will hijack your day with unimportant requests that keep you from redeeming the time.
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