Where Does the Time Go?
I used to hear my grandmother say, “Don’t get old, time flies by.” I have kept that in the back of mind as I have aged. It resonates with me because it truly does feel as if the months and the years have quickly blown by. The pages of the calendar seem to fly off the wall. Like my grandmother, I find myself saying, “Where has the time gone?” If you find yourself in a similar place, welcome to the club.
Time is one of the few things in life which is measured the same for each of us. We can’t buy or barter for more time (unless you are Joshua or Hezekiah). We can’t move to another place where residents “have more time.” We all have 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 365 days in a year (except leap year where we gain a 366th day). The only thing we don’t know is when our days will end. Unless we are alive when Jesus comes back, we will all have a finite number of days. That’s the reason David prays, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” (Ps 90:12). The idea behind David’s prayer is that we make the most of every day so that we might gain wisdom. This month we will be looking at what it means to make the most of your days.
The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge can be instructive to us in this regard. “Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left Cambridge University to join the army; he left the army because he could not rub down a horse; he returned to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: “he lost himself in vision of work to be done that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one- the gift of sustained and concentrated effort.” In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books, as he said, himself, “completed save for transcription. I am on the eve,” he says, “of sending to the press two octavo volumes.” But the books were never composed outside of Coleridge’s mind because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one has ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline.” [1]
Here is how Gordon MacDonald analyzes Coleridge’s lack of discipline when it comes to time. “Coleridge was living proof that a man or woman may be multitalented, possess enormous intelligence and remarkable communicate gifts and yet end up squandering it all because of an inability to seize control of time.”[2]
We look at Coleridge and say, “what might have been.” What I hope is that none of us, as we reach the end of our lives and reflect on days past, have cause to regret, “what might have been.” I hope instead that we will have numbered our days with purpose and meaning, and thereby, gained great wisdom.
William Barclay, Gospel of Matthew, p. 280
Gordon MacDonald. Ordering Your Private World, p. 70