“Let’s Pretend” is a game small children play. Nothing has to be purchased in order to play the game. All that is required is the use of your imagination, and most children have more than an abundant supply of that. Though “Let’s Pretend” is a child’s game, it can be played throughout life, and often is – even by adults. For example, join me in playing the game now.
”Let’s pretend” that your banker phoned you this morning and told you an anonymous donor who loves you very much has decided to deposit $864 into your bank account every day for as long as you live. That is a penny for every second in the day. You may ask, “Who in the world would do that?” But remember, this is a game of “Let’s pretend.”
Imagine having $864.00 deposited into your bank account — seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year – even if you lived to celebrate your one-hundredth birthday. That means your bank account would grow $315,360.00 every year. Who wouldn’t like for that to happen?
Let’s pretend, however, that there is a stipulation to the bequest – you must spend every cent of the money the same day that you receive it. No balance can be carried over to the following day. Each day the bank would cancel whatever sum you failed to spend.
If you were to receive such a call from your banker, you would probably say, “What is the joke? No one is going to make an offer like that.” And you would probably hang up. Or, in the event that you thought it could possibly be true, you would immediately begin to plan how you might spend that much money each day.
Playing “Let’s pretend” can be lots of fun – even though we realize the scenario mentioned above is only an imaginary one and not likely to ever become true. But, believe it or not, it is true! Someone who loves you very much deposits into your bank of time 86,400 seconds of time every single day of your life.
Each twenty-four hour day contains 86,400 seconds. There are sixty seconds in each minute, sixty minutes in each hour, and twenty-four hours in every single day that God gives us. We may use these increments of time in any way we choose. How we spend the time we have is vitally important, for none of it can ever be carried over on credit to the next day.
It is often difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to try to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. It is wise to make the most of our time. The days we have been given must be lived one at a time. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
Someone has said that time is God’s way of preventing everything from happening at once. From midnight tonight until midnight tomorrow each of us has twenty-four hours – that’s 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds. Time, like money, can be spent any way we choose, but we can spend it only once. It can be wasted, but it can never be recycled.
We all have the same amount of time every single day — whether we are rich or poor, old or young, single or married, educated or uneducated, employed or unemployed, a child in school or the President of the United States.
How did you spend your twenty-four hours yesterday? How are you spending them today? How will you spend them tomorrow? These are important questions.
At the end of each day the hours we have spent unwisely will be gone forever — for hours, like flowers, soon fade away. However, the hours we have spent glorifying God and serving mankind are on deposit in the bank of heaven and can never be lost.
The bank of heaven will never become bankrupt.
The Paper Pulpit 