"It was rumored recently that a Washington bureaucrat was considering a new rule that farmers could no longer bail their hay in round bundles. He had determined that cows needed to eat three square meals per day.
Well lots of people are unthinkingly attached to the idea that we all need three square meals per day. But the fact is, most of us can get by just as well with two meals per day. If your schedule allows, the best way to accomplish this is combining breakfast and lunch into a midmorning brunch, and eating an earlier supper. Try it for a week and you’ll wonder why you ever thought you had to have 3 hot meals.
Cutting out an extra meal saves lots of time normally spent buying food, preparing food, eating food, and cleaning up food. We can spend that time with other pursuits bigger than our appetites, such as worshiping and witnessing. And many of us could benefit by losing a few pounds and developing some self discipline in the process. All those things help us to redeeming the time.
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"Most computers today have the ability to multitask. That means they are able to run more than one program at a time. You could for example have your internet service downloading information in the background while you write a letter on your word processor at the same time.
Multitasking makes a computer more powerful and more useful. It help us to accomplish more in a given time frame than older computers which could only run one program at a time.
But multitasking isn’t just for computers. We as Christians can become more effective by leaning to multitask, especially as we include the spiritual realm. An example might be talking to the Lord in prayer while driving to work. It doesn’t take any longer to pray and drive than it does to simply drive, but it does allow us to do two things at once. And accomplishing two things instead of one means we’re redeeming the time.
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"Someone has defined mid-life crisis as the point at which a man realizes he is not going to be able to accomplish everything he set out to do.
When we are 20 we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a lifetime. It seems that with 40 or 50 years ahead of us, we can do just about anything and everything. But by the time we’re 40 we begin to realize we have limitations. A wise person will carefully talk with God each day of life’s journey to make sure they are doing all God wants them to do while at the same time not following fanciful dreams that will only lead to failure and disappointment.
Time is precious whether we are 20, 40, or 95. There is no stage of life where we have the luxury of wasting time. Learning to set realistic goals early in life and following them through to completion can avoid the so called mid-life crisis. Realistic goals also give guidance each day for redeeming the time.
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"Mark Twain said, “20 years from now you will be more disappointed over the things you did not do than by the things you did which failed.”
Many of us as Christians plod through life doing what we’ve always done the way we’ve always done it because, well, that’s the way we’ve always done it. Why not take 5 minutes today to consider if there is something out of the ordinary which you could do that would point people to Jesus.
Maybe you could stop by a Christian bookstore on the way home from work today and buy five Gospel tracts to leave in a restroom or phone booth. How about dropping your pastor a note of encouragement or volunteering to help a widow from your church or community. These are things which don’t take much time but they do require initiative. They require us to think and to be alert to the opportunities God is continually bringing into our lives. And that’s a vital part of “redeeming the time”.
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