"Remember when you taught your child to walk? You were so excited, you gathered the grandparents in the living room and everyone clapped and cheered as the little one took those first baby steps from mommy’s arms to daddy’s arms.
Did you teach your child to walk by focusing on their failures or focusing on their successes? No parent teaches their child to walk by saying, “OK kid, you’ve got 12 chances to get this thing right and if you keep on falling down we’re giving up on you.”
No, we learn by failing. That principle holds true in all of life. Many people never experience God’s best for their lives because they focus on failure. Failure is an event. It is not a person. We can fail many times and not be a failure. No one is a failure until they stop using their time to accomplish the thing God wants them to do.
Consistently focusing on our goals, while learning from our failures, is God’s method of redeeming the time.
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"Someone said, “Life was a flurry that occurred on the way to the grave.”
That little one liner gives a good summary of the way many people live their lives today. “A flurry of meaningless activity on the way to the grave.” Certainly there is nothing wrong with activity, even a flurry of activity, as long as it is the right activity that God wants us to be doing. The problem is that much of the time we substitute a flurry of activity for the one or two activities God is really calling us to do.
Remember the story of Mary and Martha. When Jesus came to visit them, Martha was so caught up in the flurry of activity, she missed the main point of spending precious time with Jesus. The Lord on the other hand commended Mary, who in spite of the flurry, made Jesus her first priority.
Let’s learn from that account what really matters to God, so that even in the midst of a flurry, we’ll still know how to redeem the time.
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"Professional trainer Bryan Flanagan identifies four stages of growth.
In stage one, we are “Unconsciously Incompetent.” We’re naive. We don’t even realize how little we know.
In stage two we become “Consciously Incompetent.” We start to realize how little we know and we start to do something about it.
Stage three is “Consciously Competent.” We realize our hard work is paying off as we master a new skill.
Stage four is “Unconsciously Competent.” The new skill has now become second nature and we don’t even think about it any more.
In 2 Peter 1, God describes the Christian life as one of continual growth. Yet many resist growth because it can be painful and humbling to admit your needs and incompetencies. Escaping those first stages of “unconsciously incompetent” and “consciously incompetent” requires that we apply some effort. But the rewards are there, for those who want to redeem the time.
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"A foreigner was visiting the US and said, “I don't understand your American roads. When you have a bump in the road you put a sign up saying 'bump'. In my country we just fix the bump.”
That was a good observation. All too often we treat the symptoms instead of the disease. We deal with surface issues while ignoring root problems. Effective time management however must get at the root of the problem.
For example, many frustrated people claim they don’t have enough time to get everything done. When the real problem is, they’ve never clearly determined what it is God wants them to do. They can’t experience satisfaction from a job well done, because they’re simply toiling day to day without even knowing what their completed goal would look like if it did happen.
Getting to the root problem, or “fixing the bump,” instead of putting up a sign, is the only way to really redeem the time.
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