A column by Dr. Ann Hollingsworth
My Sunday School lesson this last week had the statement in it that “Whatever it is you are living for becomes your god.” How do we know what we are living for? There are two resources that we use that tell that story for ourselves and for the other people we might look at. Those are our time and our money.
We all have the same amount of time in a day, week, and ultimately a lifetime, even though everyone’s life time may not be the same number of years. We all have certain things that we spend time on such as eating, sleeping, going to school if we are not yet “grown” or going to work if we are grown. But there is that discretionary time that we can choose what we do with it. As children, that is often governed by the direction of the adults in our lives. As adults, we choose. You might say that your spouse chooses for you with the long list of “Honey-do’s.” But as adults, when we do what someone else wants us to do, we are still responsible for that choice.
We all don’t have the same amount of money, but we all do have similar common expenses, such as housing, food, and other daily necessities of life. As with our time, that money that is left over after those common expenses is our choice on how it is spent.
We tell the world what is truly important to us by how we spend our time and money. We can waste both of these, or we can use them wisely. The rule of investment applies in that our choices bring consequences. Wasted time leaves much undone that we may want to do. Wasted money leaves us without much that we might want.
What we live for does become our god in that it begins to control us, and we can find ourselves putting it as a priority on time and money. If we think about it, we can know what we want to live for and then line up spending our time and money to fit that.
