Victor Borge, the renowned pianist, once told a friend that he could tell time by his piano. The friend wasn’t convinced, so Borge proceeded to prove his point. He immediately began playing a resounding march. In only moments there was a noisy banging on the wall, and a loud voice in the next apartment screamed, “Stop that noise! Don’t you know it is 1:30 in the morning?”
Borge had his way of telling time by playing his piano, but he can’t stop time. Only God can do that. Time is like a rapidly flowing river in that once your craft is launched, there is no turning back and no stopping it. The craft of life in which we are riding is carried faster and faster through the turbulence of white water rapids. We would like to slow things down for a little while. But we can’t.
The entity called time is in some ways a strange thing. We do not realize how important it is until we have so little of it left. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians strive to understand it, yet even as they are pondering it, they are controlled by it. Like money, once time is spent, it is gone forever.
What would you do if you received a letter from your bank saying, “Every morning $1,440 will be deposited in your account, and that each evening whatever balance you have failed to use will be deleted”? You would, of course, spend it all – every penny of it, before the bank closed each day. Actually each of us has such a bank. It is called the bank of TIME.
God deposits each day 1,440 minutes into your account. When the day is over those minutes will be gone, never to return again. It would be great if they could, but that will not happen. Each day thereafter is opened with a fresh account of 1,440 possible minutes. At the end of the day they will have vanished into thin air. The minutes you have used wisely will continue to bless you and possibly others. The minutes you failed to use wisely will represent a needless loss. To use tomorrow’s minutes is impossible. Your clock is running.
- To realize the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed a grade in school.
- To realize the value of ONE MONTH, ask a mother whose baby died four weeks after being born.
- To realize the value of ONE HOUR, ask the wife who is waiting for her husband to arrive from Iraq after a long deployment when she has just learned his plane is running an hour late.
- To realize the value of ONE MINUTE, ask the person who just missed his flight.
- To realize the value of ONE SECOND ask the basketball player whose team lost the championship because the shot he made came one second late.
- To realize the value of ONE MILLISECOND, ask the person who won the silver medal in the Olympics.
There is no better time to focus on the value of time and the most productive way to use it than at the beginning of each New Year. Let us all treasure every minute of every hour that we are given, for it is a precious gift from God. It is the surest way that you and I will be able to both glorify God and bless others.
Why is this true? Hours and flowers soon fade away.