I was scrolling through my Facebook feed this morning which has been overrun by political outrage and/or rejoicing… depending on which side of the fence you might be on. That is not what I like the book of face for… I like it for much more innocent adventures… like cute pictures of baby animals or posts that warm my heart or posts that make me reflect.
The latter was found when a friend posted an excerpt of the following quote:
Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of your life that you’ll never get back. Your time is your life. That is why the greatest gift you can give someone is your time.
It is not enough to just say relationships are important; we must prove it by investing time in them. Words alone are worthless. “My children, our love should not be just words and talk; it must be true love, which shows itself in action.” Relationships take time and effort, and the best way to spell love is “T-I-M-E.”
That quote can be found in the book “Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren and whether or not you love or hate or have even read the book itself, it’s the quote that I couldn’t shake.
In fact, for me personally, there are a number of quotes in Warren’s book that have stuck with me long after the first time I read through it even though I am not a fan of a lot of what I read… maybe those additional quotes will show up in a future blog post but for now, I want to talk about time…
Time… it’s both relative and finite… a few hours at work may feel like years while the same block of time spent with a friend feels like minutes and yet, in the grand scheme of things, the same amount has passed.
Time passes… we’ve all walked out of a particularly bad movie watching experience and said or felt “wow… I’m never going to get that time back”
And while we all have the same hours in a day as Albert Einstein or Helen Keller or Michealangelo or Da Vinci or Mother Theresa or Richard Dawkins or Stephen King or… well, you get the idea…. How we spend those finite hours is generally defined by what is important to us.
We work not because we necessarily love the job we do or the company or whatever, but because we love the life it affords us. We like having things like electricity and a roof over our heads and food on our table.
We allocate time to our hobbies because they feed our soul…
And even the people we allow to share our time – those that we sit with and listen to or share our troubles with… those that we laugh and cry with… those that we take a millisecond out of our busy day to send a text to let them know that they matter. Those are the people we deem important.
In this age of being overly connected to one another, how much time does it REALLY take to let someone, another human being, know that you crossed their mind, which means they gave you part of their time… and whether a second or hours, that’s time that they will never get back. It is a gift. It should be valued and appreciated for the commodity that it is.
The other factor to consider here is that you may not know just how important that gift is to the recipient.
The text you send to a friend you are thinking about might come at the exact moment they need to be reminded that someone gives a shit. The time you spend with a child might be exactly what they need to recharge their soul. The hours of conversation you share with a friend might be exactly what they need to know where they fit and to reconfirm something you take for granted.
Those of you who take time out of your day to read this (whether I know you do or not) give me a gift of knowing I’m not alone.
For that and all the gifts of time I receive from you are appreciated and make me grateful that you share my world. In whatever form that takes.
Thank you. Sincerely.
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