Making time to slow down. For a number of years now, I have been more and more concerned with just how fast time is moving. Why does time fly when you’re having fun but it slows down when you’re not? I think I might have discovered how to make time slow down. As I was preparing for some of the mechanics of preaching a message on Sunday, I found myself a bit tired out. I looked down at my phone clock thinking that it must be about 2 hours later, but it wasn’t. Only 30 minutes had passed by. How can this be? Time had slowed down. What had happened? I wondered if God had slowed time down for me so that I could get this hard task done and still have time for the rest of the more enjoyable things I had planned. Then I realized that most really important things we do are hard things. Time seems to slow down because we feel uncomfortable or tired from the effort. We want to be in some other place or time doing something else that is more enjoyable, more fun, and less draining of ourselves.
Important things we do are often hard, and time seems to slow down while we trudge through them. This may be more of a gift than we think. Often we dream about time away from doing hard things. We fantasize about kicking our feet in the sand, riding rides at our favorite theme park, or something simpler like laughing with friends around a card table. And when we look down at our clocks, we see that time has slipped away. Then we want more time. That may be less a gift and more a burden as we think that a lot of our time may be wasted doing things that aren’t important at all. I’m not saying I’ve taken a stand against vacations and having pure mindless fun. (Please don’t take this away from me!) But there is something really cool about doing something important, something that helps you reach your God-given dreams and goals- something really hard for you. While others are trying to find more time doing things that don’t matter as much, you can slow time down by doing something important. Cool, huh?