A Day in the Life

Time is the one thing we are all given equally each day. We cannot carry over unused time from yesterday, nor can we borrow time from tomorrow. Today you will have the exact same 24 hours that everybody else has. It makes no difference how wealthy or poor, old or young, educated or unlearned a person is—they get an equal measure of time.

We don’t get the same number of days. More disturbing, we have no idea how many days we will have.

When my grandfather (Garman Kimmell, founder of Kimray) died, he was certain of what would come next. He knew he would be with his Lord and Savior and he was unafraid of death. He was, however, very concerned that he had not completed everything he had thought of to do or create. He was disappointed that he had run out of days.

When I was young, I would hear “old” people say how their days just flew by. We all know that time is constant unless you are moving very, very fast. So for humans on earth, each day is the same. However, our perception of those days changes.

If you are one year old, another year doubles your life. You perceive that as a long time. By the time you are fifty, another year only adds 2% to your life. That’s not much. Two percent of something goes by quickly. If we compare it to a day, for the one year old it is a whole other day. For the fify-year-old it is 30 minutes. So, as we get older, our perception of time changes and time does seem to “fly by.”

These two facts are cause for me to be more intentional about how I spend the time I have. I can no longer afford to let my life fly by without getting something for the time I am spending. I want a return on that investment. Like my grandfather, I have lot of things I would like to get done and a dwindling number of days left to do them.

However, the most important thing I can spend my time on is other people. Making a difference in someone’s life by being there for them, helping them, serving them, or just doing life with them is where the greatest return is found. When I am near my end, I would like to have a very long list of ideas I didn’t get around to, and an even longer list of people that I did.

Spend your time wisely today.