The Choice of Every Hour

One of the easiest answers to anything we don’t want to do, is to say we don’t have time. Sometimes this is true. Sometimes it isn’t. It is deeply and desperately true that we don’t have time to do everything, or to be everything, or to learn everything, or to go everywhere. It is true that we have to make choices as to the use of every hour. But there are periods of procrastination, of indecision, and of doing trivial things, that take more time than we sometimes suppose. And often we wait for what we call a more opportune time. But we can seldom count on ideal conditions. We have to learn to work with the time we have, with life as it is, under the conditions in which we live it. And in reality we often take time to do what we want to do, yet feel we haven’t time to do what we ought to do: Sometimes we feel we haven’t time to visit someone who is sick or in sorrow; that we haven’t time to teach, to read, to learn, to serve, to assist, to improve, or even to repent — yet while saying or assuming we haven’t time, we may still spend too much time on trivial pursuits, or on repetitious routine. If we can’t have a long visit, perhaps we can make much of a short one. If we don’t have time to say everything, perhaps we can say the essential things. We never get anything talked out altogether, anyway. Yet we often take time in repeating some things long after the real essentials have been said. Furthermore, we should learn that there is, in a sense, no free ticket to anything — for we pay an irreplaceable price for everything that takes time. We should decide to “do many things” — good and constructive and useful things — “of our own free will.” And as to making good use of the opportune moment, Shakespeare said it in these profound sentences: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea we are now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.”¹ This is not something to put us in panic, but something which should lead us to quiet resolution as to the purposeful use of each new day, each new year, each new length of life that the Lord God has given.