Hosea 10:12 - Spending Time

Hosea 10:12 “Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to seek the LORD, until he comes and showers righteousness on you.”

There are some very neat life lessons that you can learn at work from your coworkers. One of my co-workers spends his time in an interesting fashion, each day and every day despite working a 10 hour shift that night, he manages to drag himself over to the golf course and spends at least 2 hours whacking a little white ball around a perfectly manicured grass course. He is out there, rain or shine, wind or snowfall - if the course is open, he is going to play. Several other coworkers of mine go home and get on their game consoles to play an online game together. This also takes up a couple hours of their time and they do this every day.

Each of my coworkers spends their precious moments of free time in a unique way on something they enjoy. Of everything in this world, time is the most precious. Its more valuable than gold, silver, or government bonds. There are only 24 hours in the day, 168 hours in a week, 720 in a month (depending on the month) and 8,760 hours in a year. Statistically we spend 1/3 of our life sleeping - or roughly 8 hours per day - so suddenly our 24 hours drop down to 16, and our 8,760 drops to 5,840. A 40 hour work week means that we will spend 2,080 hours in a year working, leaving us with 3,760 hours left in our year. If we average about an hour per meal, our available free time drops down to 2,665 hours. Surveys state that your typical person will spend just over 2 hours in a car each day just driving. Which is 730 hours in a year. That drops us to 1,935 hours available in our year. That averages out to essentially 37 hours free each week. Sounds pretty reasonable right? Its a weekend for us. So how then is it that we have problems finding a meager 15 minutes each day to spend in our devotions?

Time is precious and the only one who knows how much of it we have is God.  How we spend our time is a testament to our person, beliefs, character, families, habits, hobbies and pleasures, priorities, and God.  If you know how someone spends their free time then you can usually make a decent guess as to the state of their soul. So what about your free time? What does it say about you? Where do you spend your free time? And on what?

This week, why don't we re-evaluate our time usage. We complain about never having enough time, but why is that? What do we need to do or change to spend more time with God?

Thou hidden source of calm repose,
thou all-sufficient love divine,
my help and refuge from my foes,
secure I am if thou art mine;
and lo! from sin and grief and shame
I hide me, Jesus, in thy name.
                                 Charles Wesley, 1749.