make the best use of your time
despite all the difficulties
Last week, I wrote about Ephesians 5:15 and gave a prompt to take a sort of heart’s inventory this summer. To evaluate your life, and how you spend your time, in order to determine if you are living aligned with the values God has given you. This sort of inventory is helpful to do with some regularity. It is terribly easy for me to go about my days, forgetting my purpose and intentions.
The next verse in this short passage in Ephesians 5 is this:
Make the best use of your time, despite all the difficulties of these days.
This makes me think of Gandalf’s words in The Lord of the Rings: “All we have to do decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
We all have our responsibilities, roles, and limitations. We are family members, employees, parents, spouses, friends. We have physical ailments, financial realities, certain giftings, and lack thereof.
And all of us have the most limited resource: time.
The question we must ask, in the face of all our limitations and responsibilities, how will we use this limited resource of time? Especially, in the face of “all the difficulties of these days.”
In the face of wars and rumors of war, in the face of the rising cost of groceries and homes, in the face of gender confusion and gun violence, in the face of threats of terrorism and messages from all sides promoting values that directly oppose those of God’s Kingdom.
In the face of all these things in the world and within the difficulties of our very particular lives, how will we spend our time?
Will we spend it complaining? Worrying? Bitter? Will we spend it numbed out on a screen? Doing whatever we can to make just “a little more” money? Will we spend it wishing it were different? Will we spend it isolated? Will we spend it cramming our schedules full so we (and our families) are not allowed even a moment’s silence?
Or, will we determine to spend our time pursuing goodness, hospitality, friendship with Jesus, service, beauty?
Our times may be difficult, and your life may be full of particular difficulties that are stretching you incredibly thin and weary. As I write this, I think of several dear friends facing significant hardships.
My prayer for us all is that we determine how to spend the time that is given us. That we recognize the reality of our difficulties in light of the reality of God’s strength, care, and wisdom.
I think of this quote by James Bryan Smith and hope it encourages you: