There are many days when I have wished time to go faster. There are many days when I’ve wanted them to be over and to be able to move on to the next one.
Let’s say I do this once a week. That means there are 52 days a year that I have just given up on a day and yearned to just move on to the next one.
52 days. That’s more than a month-and-a-half.
When you couple that number with the fact that at least once a week, I’m impatiently wishing I had more time for this or that, that means that — as the cool kids say — I’m doing it wrong.
A look at time
Time.
We’ve been given it, but we waste it.
We never seem to have enough of it yet we’re never happy with the time that we have.
As I’ve mentioned before, we can watch a three-hour football game, but we can barely give one-sixth of that to our Lord in Adoration.
We don’t know how much of it we have left on this Earth, but every day means we have less of it ahead of us than we did before.
We’re probably all “doing it wrong”.
Work, work, work
When it comes to how we spend our time, I realize that the elephant in the room to deal with is work.
We have to work. God told us that we’d toil in the soil so we have to work.
For those of us who have to work, this is where our gross misuse of time is its ugliest.
Let’s say we have to spend the typical eight hours a day at work.
I’m excluding travel time, lunch time, coffee time (cocoa for me), and other break times, but ok, eight hours — one-third of the day — is spent at work per weekday.
Since it’s all work, does that give us a free pass to waste that time as long as our work is getting done?
The answer is probably “no”.
But, how can we use our work time wisely and in a holy and faithful way?
Ah, there’s something every good person of faith has been trying to figure out forever.
I guess I have three pieces of advice for that.
• Pray — at the beginning, middle, and end of the work day.
• Work — get your stuff done. Make a daily list if you have to, but do whatever you need to do to feel accomplished and productive.
• Take breaks — say what? I’ll have a bunch of bosses writing angry letters to me, but I say it’s ok to pause and smell the roses sometimes. Look at a funny dog meme. Go get a soda. go for a short walk and see if anyone else at your workplace made brownies. If anyone asks while you’re taking a short break, tell them Kevin said it was ok. I’m sure that’ll work.
Pray, pray, pray
I’ve spoken many times that we all know we need to pray more.
No matter how many times I say it or how many times we lament it, we need to pray more.
Do you want to feel like you’re spending your time wisely and not wasting precious precious time, pray more!
Pray when you wake up. Pray before you go to sleep. Pray before meals. Again, pray at work (because I’m sure we all need it during parts of the work day!).
You won’t lose your free time by praying too much. Maybe you can only binge one episode of a series on Hulu instead of two because of spending your time in prayer, but hey, then the series will last longer!
Counting down
As you read this, time is ticking.
That’s not a bad thing, that’s just reality.
Our clocks are ticking down from the minute we are born, but that’s ok. That’s part of the grand plan.
In our human frailty, we’ll never use our time 100 percent perfectly, but we can do the best we can with God’s help.
So right now, use your next minute wisely.
At the end of the day, hopefully, you will not feel like you have wasted your time and those wasted days and years will have become time well spent.