Time Enough

Do you sometimes feel that your days are chopped up into tiny little pieces? All the things that call for your attention may make you feel as though you are being pulled in a great many directions all at once.

Perhaps there are many small—but urgent—tasks at work so that you cannot give your best energy to the one thing that requires special concentration. At home, there seem always to be interruptions that take you away from what you had planned and perhaps desperately need to do. Maybe there is in your life a friend or family member who, for the hundredth time, demands your immediate response. Some of our days just refuse to flow with easy grace. They unravel around the edges and get ragged. We try to stitch them together, but the seams show.


"I don't have time for that," we lament. "If I just had more time . . ." The truth is—and we've heard it often—we all have the same amount of time. Sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That is enough, although we often feel the pressure that comes from trying to wring something extra out of our allotment. The Irish have a wise old saying: "When God made time, He made plenty of it." That echoes what was said by the wisest man ever. "Those who are wise will find a time and a way to do what is right, for there is a time and a way for everything, even when a person is in trouble." (Ecclesiastes 8:5, 6) The time we have is enough, or else we shall have to accuse God of cheating us out of something we need!

God created time. He rolled eternity up on one side and everlasting up on the other, and into the chasm between the two, He dropped time. He placed us in it, limiting what we know and what we can accomplish to just that little span of our lifetimes. We feel so strong about our limitations, however, that we sometimes see time as an enemy. It has changed the way we feel about some people, or how they feel about us. It has taken its toll on our health or on that of someone we care about. Time has robbed us, we think, of opportunities that are now lost. Time has just about worn us out with waiting for some things to become what we have hoped for; it has made impossible the changing of some things that are into what we wish they were. Time sometimes seems like an inexorable foe, marching relentlessly on us.

But time is the stuff that life is made of, and life is a gift, measured out to us one "now" at a time. God can help us be wise, so that we will find a time and a way to do what is right!

MaryMartha

Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. United States of America. All rights reserved.