Time Wise

Psalm 90:¹² “Teach us to use wisely all the time we have.” (CEV)

Having margin creates space for all the great things that God wants to do in your life. You need to have faith and walk in wisdom. The second area that we need to create margin is with our Time. We need to spend our time wisely. Spend your time wisely. You cannot invest your time; you can only spend your time. You cannot invest time and get more time. It does not work that way. Every man has an allotted time. Paul said, ‘I have finished my course, I am done, my time is over. I need to go’ (2 Tim.4:7, paraphrased). When it was time for Jesus to go, Jesus said my time is up. Everybody has time but the time you have, you cannot invest it. There is a manner of investing of time, but it is not really investing of time because you cannot get time back. You can spend your time and spend it wisely.

How? By expecting the best and planning for the worst. There is a planning fallacy by two cognitive scientists called Kahneman and Tversky. They said, “We know that our past predictions about how long something would take are overly optimistic, but we are convinced that our current predictions are totally realistic.” What does that mean? As a project manager, you know that all the projects you have said you will finish in three weeks, do not finish in three weeks. Nothing is wrong with you; that is the nature of projects. But your current projects, you are so sure that you will finish in three weeks. That is how we deceive ourselves. You come up with a to-do list of what you are going to do today, and you did not finish it. Meanwhile, you are jamming the new day again, and it leads to frustration.

God wants us to spend our time wisely. You cannot be there for everybody. But you can be there for the people that are most important in your life. You cannot be there for the whole world, but you can be there for God, in fulfilling God’s counsel and purpose for your life. Eph.5:¹⁶ “Making the very most of the time [buying up each opportunity], because the days are evil.” (AMP). This is where it gets interesting with time. You can spend your time by buying up opportunities, that is the secret. So, you spend your time buying yourself opportunities. You are spending your minutes in exchange for opportunities to do good. For people who participate in community outreach programs, for instance, they spend their time creating opportunities to do good and affect people’s lives. That is huge! Such people get a harvest back in a way that leaves everyone else amazed. You spend your time, your minutes in exchange for opportunities.

And sometimes, the reason we do not have margin is there are so many opportunities that sometimes we overspend our time. You need to stop trying to chase every opportunity. What is the one thing that you most focus on that will make a difference in every area of your life?

Prayer: Father, teach me to use all the time I have wisely to advance the Kingdom of God and to influence the souls of men for the Kingdom of God, in Jesus Name. Amen!