When someone thinks about what is valuable, the usual answers will probably come up: money, precious metals, stocks, real estate, etc. And yes those things are valuable. But there is a possession of ours that is more valuable than all of the money in the world. And it doesn’t matter if you are Bill Gates and a multi-billionaire or a homeless person living on the street. Both share this invaluable commodity. It is the twenty four hours that we are given each day by God to use.
We all make claims as to what is important to us. Another way of saying that is we make claims as to what (or who) is valuable to us. How do we actually show these claims to be true? By our actions. Just like saying “I love you” means nothing if one doesn’t act in a loving way towards the person who is supposedly loved, so too it is for what we claim is valuable to us. And the clearest indicator of what is important to us, what is valuable to us, is how much time we devote to it. How much of our precious twenty four hours a day we give to something or someone is the true gauge of the value to us.
Actually, going back to the example of the difference in saying “I love you” and truly showing love is very much connected to the use of our time. How much of our time we are willing to give to another is very much associated to how much we truly have love for that person. We have heard often the admonition to “make the time” for something or someone. This is exactly what it means to love. To give of our most pre-cious resource, our time, to another is one of the most central expressions of love. By “spending” our time on someone, we are eliminating that period of time that we can use for our own wants and desires and needs. It is truly the gift of self; it is love.
So we all should be asking ourselves about how we use our time (including us priests). How much of my time do I give my family, my spouse, my children, my job, my hobbies, my church, social media, my friends, and of course God? For instance, there are 168 hours in a week. Sunday Mass is about an hour….that’s just under 0.6% of the week. Even with a really long homily, it would still be far less than one percent of the whole week. Compare that to how much time during the week do we spend at the gym? Or watching TV? What about prayer? If one were to pray just 15 minutes of each day, that would be just about 1% of the whole day. Even if you take into account getting eight hours of sleep at night, 15 minutes a day of prayer would still only be 1.5% of the day. And compare that to how much time a day do we play games on our phones and computers and tablets? Or how much time do we spend a day on social media?
No matter what we claim, what we actually do with our time shows what is important to us. Perhaps a good summer exercise would be to inventory the use of our time and evaluate whether it matches our statements of what is important to us. If it doesn’t, then maybe it would be helpful to reprioritize the use of our time, including the time we spend on the Lord, to keep it in line with what we say is important to us. This is the best way to use the great treasure that God gives us, our time.
God bless you,
Father Joseph Byerley
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