Our Most Valuable Asset

Psalm 90:10-12 ESV The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

I was walking through the downtown area of my hometown the other night and ran into my college Economics professor, Dr. David Ritter. One of the first things that I and anyone who has taken an economics course learned is that value is driven by two things...supply and demand. So imagine if something had infinite demand and as minuscule a measurement of finite supply as you can imagine, it would be worth everything, correct?


The smallest measurable unit of time currently observable is an "attosecond," one-quintillionth of one second. That is all that we are given by God. An infinitesimal supply of something that we have huge amounts of demand against. We are not promised a whole second, a whole minute, or a whole day, but we squander so much time away.


Jonathan Edwards, the great 18th century pastor, resolved, "never to lose one moment of time, but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can." Edwards resolution was to take this most valuable of resources and make it worth even more. To, as he later resolves, "live so, as I shall wish I had done when I come to die."


How do we do this, though? I remember reading somewhere that the one thing that cannot be found in the Bible is the trivial. However, how much of what distracts us is just that...trivia. We are distracted in the present by things that are, in the grand scheme of things, meaningless. We are distracted by things in the past that we cannot change. We are distracted by worries of what the future holds...a future that we are not even sure we will ever see. And, I believe today especially, we are distracted by what we can have now. We do not wish to wait for anything. We want fast food, faster Internet service, everything right now with no effort required. Mark Tabb, in Living With Less defines a slower, more purposeful life as, "saying no to immediate gratification and choosing a sacrificial path of devoting ourselves to what matters most."


This should be our gauge for evaluating our life. What are we doing with our time? Will God be happy with our "investment strategy?" 2 Corinthians 5:10 reminds us that we will be called into judgment to give an account of what we have done with our time. So consider this a quarterly account statement. Is your time investment profitable or are you looking at a loss thus far? The good thing is that if you are reading this post, then you still have "time" to reallocate your investment.