Where does the time go?

 The great Baptist preacher Vance Havner wrote 

A South Carolina friend told me about meeting a typical old Southern gentleman who said, "I used to come over to your town quite often in the old days. It was a day's round trip by horse and buggy. I can do it in an hour now but I don't have time!" That just about sums up the tempo - and the tragedy - of these hurried times. I noticed recently that one of our church hymnals now no longer carries the precious song, "Take Time to be Holy." Who has time to be holy? We've got a program we must put over!"

Wow! Truer words have not been written. At one time people were concerned with computers and all the other "time-saver devices" that people's biggest problem would be boredom, but I haven't found that to be a problem. Neither have most people. In fact, it's just the opposite. It seems the more time we save, the busier we are and the less time we have. 

Holiness does take time. So does relationships. I can remember growing up on the farm and spending many evenings sitting on the front porch with family or visiting neighbors. Few of us even know our neighbors today. I remember one evening coming home from a PTA meeting with Mom (do they even have those anymore?) and seeing Dad sitting on the front porch talking to a neighbor. He had come over close to dark, went back to our lake and caught a feed sack full of bull frogs. He was going to take them home to get a mess of frog legs for future meals after visiting for awhile.

Some talk about the good old days, but I doubt that many really want to go back to dirt roads, outhouses, kerosene lamps or three channels on our TV sets. What they probably mean is that they wish we again had time to build relationships with one another, spend time with our families, have time to actually sit down to think and meditate on truly important things, take long walks down country roads and spend quiet time with God.

The same is true for churches. Some of us spend so much time trying to find ways to make our churches bigger that we fail to make them deeper. Like our relationships, many churches are a mile wide and an inch deep. Too many people's faith lacks substance and depth. Even if they sing "Take Time to be Holy" a look at their lives would find little holiness.

I wonder what would happen if we slowed our lives down a little and focused more on the really important things in life and less on what others think is urgent. What if we spent more time in the Word of God and less in the things of the world? How would our lives be different? What if we spent less of our time on lesser things and began investing our time in more important things?