Thought for the week: Don't waste your time

Once a year, and for only an hour, we can ‘turn back time’. Only in television dramas is anything other than that possible, no matter how fervently we wish it to be otherwise.

A poet, longing for a mother’s comfort, pleaded: ‘Backward, turn backward, O time in thy flight Make me a child again, just for tonight’.

Early in life we learn the bitter lesson that there are certain things we cannot bring back. An old proverb advised that there are three things which do not return; the spent arrow, the spoken word and the lost opportunity. Another poet, Edward Fitzgerald, in his translation of an eastern masterpiece, ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’, put the message bluntly:

‘The Moving Finger writes; and having writ.

Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it’

Since we cannot ‘turn back time’, it is imperative that we use time wisely. We need to ‘fill the unforgiving minute’ with purposeful living, for hours and days frittered away can soon become months and years which cannot be reclaimed.

In a village church in Essex this little motto was first displayed: ‘When as a child I laughed and wept, time crept; When as a youth I waxed more bold, time strolled; When I became a full-grown man, time ran; When older still I daily grew, time flew; Soon I shall find, in passing on, time gone!”

Few people used time more productively than the apostle Paul. Writing to his friends in Corinth he listed the dangers he had faced in the service of Christ, and added: ‘I have laboured and toiled and often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food: I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches’(2 Corinthians 11; 27,28).

Paul, therefore, was well placed to advise others, ‘Make the most of every opportunity’(Ephesians 5; 16). Only in that way can we avoid the lament of a Shakespearean king: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me’.