The Time Has Come, First Part

Some folks can’t say no thanks to a salesperson at the door. Others have the toughest time passing up a free puppy. Or driving by a garage sale without stopping. Still others find it incredibly difficult to resist the urge to bet. My weakness is books on the investment of my time. Books that let me know ways to replace being busy with being effective. Books that caution me to think things thru before falling into them. I frequently recall what Bernard Baruch once asserted.

Whatever disasters I’ve known, whatever blunders I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed privately and public life, have been the implications of action without thought. The antidote to that problem is described best by Paul in his letter to the Ephesians:. Ensure you understand what the Master wants. Some alarm down within my system goes off whenever I sense a waste of energy in what I am doing—when there’s some leak in my time dike I have not managed to plug.

Without desiring to be highly-strung about it, I am getting a little twitchy when I suspect I’m really not living purposefully, when I’m not making the maximum of each opportunity, as Scripture so clearly commands. The verse that appears just before the passage I quoted pushs a long, pointed index finger into the chest of its reader as it screams. Today, we’d say it like this : “Hey, wake up.

“the simplest thing in the world is to drift thru life in an obscure, careless demeanour.

He tells us to take time by the throat, give it a good shake, and declare : “That’s it. I am going to manage you—no longer will you manage me. That angle is a most important step and a major secret to living above our circumstances instead of under them.