Mother Goose Wisdom
How to Use Your Time Wisely
Hickory, dickory, dock
The mouse ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down!
Hickory, dickory, dock
These nursery rhymes we learned as children can have a lasting impact on our lives if we take a moment and remember and let them speak into our lives now. We need to let the lessons from our childhood transform us as adults.
This rhyme about a mouse and clock can teach us that time is something we can control. Many times, at the end of a day have you ever wondered where in the world the day went? We all have 24 hours every day. If we are smart, we just might stop every once in a while, and instead of wondering where those hours go we can tell them where they are going to go.
There is a right time and a right way to do everything, but we know so little, are words Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 8:6. Maybe we can take a few minutes and learn a little bit about how to use our time wisely.
Take Your Time Seriously
The Bible in Ephesians 5:15 – 16 gives us some solid advice when it says: Live life with a due sense of responsibility, not as ones who do not know the meanings of life, but as those who do. Make the best use of your time… These verses challenge us to take our time seriously. Each day is lived and then cannot be relived so we better make sure we are intentional with each day.
Invest, Spend or Waste Your Time
In Psalm 90:12 David prays to God, Teach us to make the most of our time, so that we may grow in wisdom. So there are three ways to spend your time. Invest in making the world a better place, spend time with those you love or waste it looking at one more video online. We need to remember that we chose what will happen to our time. Wasting it is so easy to do, but in the end we will look back and be changed by the days we invested or spent with those we love.
Move When the Time Is Right
Once again we often wait for the right moment to do anything. The only problem is that the perfect time will never be here. There is simply the time to act and to move. Solomon again challenges us in Ecclesiastes 11:4: If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done. So the time is now, and we need to move quickly. We have all wasted so much time waiting for things to be just right. Then when we finally move we wonder why we ever waited. So don’t wait and wish you had moved earlier. Instead, celebrate the choices you made and acted even when things were a little shaky.
Evaluate or Stagnate with Your Time
Galatians 6:4 encourages us to do a little deep dive on ourselves and our time. Each person should judge his own actions and not compare himself with others. Then he can be proud for what he himself has done. We need to evaluate how we spend our time so that we can correct what needs to be corrected. It takes time to judge our use of time. But, in the end we will gain more time eventually. So take a little time each week to figure out how you can “steal” time back.
24 hours is all we get. If we never stop and ask where our time goes then we end up like that mouse we read about as kids. He went up and down and clock and no sense of what is ticking away from us with each minute. My hope is that we can all sit down and figure out where our time goes and begin to invest our time in something that will outlive us and change the world around us.