Take the Time

…many times we are just too busy to reflect well about the future.

God Dreams, Will Mancini and Warren Bird

“I’ve got so much on my plate right now. I’ll see if I can make time for this opportunity.” Have you ever found yourself saying or thinking something like this before?

We’re all busy. We all fill the time we have in a variety of ways. What one person thinks is a waste of time another finds absolutely essential for life. There is no judgement here on how we spend the time that we have; only a suggestion on how to spend at least a little bit of it.

Because our lives are so busy, we don’t often take the time to think about the future. I’m certainly guilty of this from time to time. I get so focused on preparing for Sunday (because – and they don’t teach you this in seminary – Sunday happens every single week…) that I sometimes forget about looking to the future. I don’t think about what needs to happen over the next quarter, the next six months, the next year, because I’m too busy trying to focus on this coming Sunday.

This is true for all sorts of people in all walks of life as well. What is right in front of us gets the most attention because it seems to be the most pressing. But here’s a nasty little secret that we all know, but don’t want to admit: we can’t make time for anything.

That’s right. We don’t have the power to make time. We don’t have the authority to give ourselves a 26 hour day. We can’t add another day to the week or week to the year. It cannot be done. The time we have is all we have. We cannot add to it, but our habits and distractions can certainly seem to take away from it. It’s the hard truth of life.

Do you have something important coming up? Take the time that is necessary in your schedule to focus on it – even for just a little bit. I’ve found for myself that in 2-3 hours of highly focused (some may even call it “deep”) work I can accomplish more than I can in an entire day of unfocused work. If I can get in a focused groove, the actual writing of a sermon can go from 6 hours to 2 hours – that’s half a day’s worth of work in which I can focus on other issues.

The bottom line here is that we have more control over our schedule and hours than we think. We can carve out time in our schedule for visioning, for looking ahead, for planning – if we really want to. We can take the time we have and use it for something that will pay off in the long term. Or, we can sit around and play Candy Crush.

Don’t get me wrong. I see the value in down time. I waste plenty of my own time doing things that others would see as distractions or silly games. And I would agree with them. Sometimes, we need that time to recharge, to shut off our brains for a bit. I don’t fault anybody for that. I do wonder – and I fall into this category at times as well – about those who do focus in on these distractions and then complain about not having time to do something. We all have time; it’s just a matter of how we use it.

So, take the time to think ahead, to plan for your future, because it’s only when we do this that we can truly open ourselves up to new possibilities for our future.