Time of Your Life
I was talking to Cameron Hamilton, one of our track athletes recently and I noticed he had shaved his head for the season. He says it makes him faster, or at least, he feels faster. For a sprinter, the difference between first and second place could be a hair. The more seconds you can shave off the better. Perspective on time differs from one event to another. A sprinter thinks that 8 seconds is really fast, while a rodeo cowboy will tell you it can feel like an eternity.
Time has a way of changing a person’s outlook on certain things. As a freshman, you feel like you have a long time to accomplish your goals, but as a senior you know it’s your last time around and probably feel some urgency. The best athlete’s have a way of slowing time down. It’s not that they possess a magic ability; it’s that they are able to anticipate, prepare, and use their gifts more quickly and efficiently than the competition. Things come into focus so much that everything else kind of stops around them. To ever experience this, you have to be organized and you have to block out distractions. I am always telling this to students I mentor academically as I know there are many distractions that are way more fun than homework and studying. If you really want to be successful though, you must take advantage of the time you have, because we are all dealt the same amount of time no matter how much we might complain about it. Everyone gets 24 hours, how you use that time to meet your responsibilities and get the outcomes you desire is your choice.
You can tell what a person values by what they spend their money on and what they spend their time doing. Your time is valuable, part of why an employer pays you is for the time you could be spending doing something else. You know how much a guy values his relationship with a girl if he is willing to watch a chick flick instead of playing video games. You know a girl values her time with a guy if she agrees to watch a violent action movie instead of a romantic comedy. A person can pretend to enjoy watching chick flicks and violent action movies for a long time, but given enough time, the true feelings will come to the surface. You can tell me you are faster than someone but the times recorded will settle the matter. You can tell me that you will jump higher or throw farther than the competition at a particular meet, but the time will come to back it up. Time reveals all truth!
If we are spending time studying for school and hanging out with our significant others, and training for athletic success, when do we spend time thinking about our spiritual life? Where do we find the time to include God in our life? How important is the spiritual part of your life? You can answer that by how much time you spend with God. One of the ways you can spend time with God is through prayer. Prayer is a great way to slow things down, to get rid of distractions, to focus, to get feelings and frustrations out, and to listen. What are you listening for? I suppose it depends on who you are listening to. You ask God to make Himself known to you and just listen, and you tell me what you hear. You don’t even have to know God to pray!
For some of you, this message is to encourage you to spend time growing in your faith, for others, I hope to encourage you to figure out what you believe and if you desire to have a personal relationship with God. Only God knows the time when Jesus will return to separate those who know Him from those who don’t. (Matthew 24:36-44). You can tell me that you don’t believe that Jesus is coming again, but to that I say, time reveals all truth.
