Lord Of The Schedule

If the Lord permits 2014 to run its course and we live to celebrate New Year’s Day 2015, we will all have had the opportunity during the year to choose how to use 8760 hours of time.  For the sake of discussion, let’s say we use seven hours a day on average for sleeping.  That means that we will use 2555 hours of our 8760 hours, leaving us with 6205 hours.  Now we need to carve out some time for eating.  Let’s be generous and allow 1 hour each for 3 meals a day.  That’s a total of 1095 hours for feeding ourselves.  That leaves 5110 hours in the year.  Let’s assume we are not independently wealthy or retired, so we also need a job.  If we work forty hour a week for 52 weeks, we will be busy at making a living for 2080 hours for the years.  Now we are left with 3030 hours after eating, sleeping, and working.

So we are talking about roughly 3000 hours of “discretionary” time in the coming year.  When you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem like much time, does it?  No wonder the year appears to go by so fast!  Of course there are other important and necessary claims on our time, such as family and friends.  Each of these (and more like them) also subtract various amounts of time from the total.  And for people of faith, we also want to make sure that God gets His share of the minutes, right?

Rather than merely giving God His “slice” of the time pie (or worse yet, the leftovers), let me encourage us all to view every hour of the year as “God’s hour.”  Every second, every minute, every hour is a gift from Him and can be devoted to His praise and glory.  God is not just another entry among others on our calendar.  He isn’t content with just being “worked into” our hectic schedule.  He ought to be the first consideration in all that we do or say (Colossians 3:17).

God loves you!
Mike