"Did you know air passes through the nose at a speed of 100 miles per hour when a person sneezes? Something else also happens when we sneeze. We often get a “God bless you” from someone, maybe even a total stranger.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could learn how to give blessings to people even when they are not sneezing? We can with practice.
We can, for example, start with our children. Many children hardly ever hear a spoken blessing from their parents. But it doesn’t take any longer to catch them doing something good and commend them on it than it does to catch them doing wrong and scold them. In fact if we catch them doing good and speak a verbal blessing to them frequently enough, it will likely reduce the amount of time we will need to spend giving discipline. Its just a matter of which habit you develop.
Learning to speak blessings to everyone you can as often as you can is a great way to redeem the time.
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"If you want something you’ve never had, you’re going to have to do something you’ve never done.
Nearly all of us say we want some things we’ve never had. They might be tangible things like a better job or a certain level of income. They may be relational, like getting along better with children, parents or co-workers. For the Christian, it might be sharing our faith and leading people to Christ on a regular basis.
All these things sound good and we say we want them, yet we resist the change required in our daily schedules to achieve them. Face it. If you aren’t getting any closer to the thing you believe God wants for you, there is a reason. And that reason may simply be that you’re spending time doing what you’ve always done and somehow expecting different results.
Remember, if you want something you’ve never had, you must do something you’ve never done. Making the changes needed to experience God’s best is a great way to redeem the time.
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"The behavioral sciences, such as sociology or psychology, are known as soft sciences. That means that unlike hard sciences, such as mathematics or chemistry, there is often much disagreement among experts in any given field. Much of what is said is actually theory, opinion and conjecture. But, one statistically verifiable conclusion has been reached which every behavioral scientist agrees with. That is, one out of every one people will someday die.
The question is not will you die, but when will you die. And the more important question is, “What will you do from now until the day you die?” Many people never ponder death and the fact that life on this earth will soon end. It is too morbid and there are too many other things going on right now to focus on death.
But when we accept the fact that sooner or later we will die we also gain a new frame of reference for evaluating what is really important and how we should redeem the time.
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"In his book, ""A Minute of Margin,"" Richard Swenson points out how you can go into a forest and select a 10 foot sapling, bend it over and let it go, and it will return to its normal height and straightness. However, if you bend it again, this time a bit further, and once again further still, you will eventually hear a snap. Now let it go, and it won't come back. It is broken.
That's an illustration of what happens when we don't schedule enough balance into our lives. We need a certain amount of pressure and tension to work well and achieve to our full potential. But when the stress exceeds that level, the result is exhaustion, frustration and burnout.
To avoid snapping, its import that we learn to build time into our schedules for recreation, physical exercise and Scripture meditation. These are not just optional luxuries. They're absolutely necessary, if we want to redeem the time.
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