This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Monday, June 21, 2021
A few weeks back, I wrote an article in tribute to Calvin Waugh, my home church pastor growing up. I can remember one of the things he would always say is that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their calendar and their check book. To bring that to more recent times, I think we can tell a lot about a person by looking at their cell phone calendar and their credit card statement. It boils down to your time and your money. Are we using these things in a way that is meaningful to us?
I always refer to Monday as my calendar/email day. This is the day I set up Livestreams for the upcoming worship services for the next Sunday, go over my calendar to send out emails to the congregation of Wayne Street, the Family Life Center Board Members, and the clergy of St Marys, and I also fill out a dry marker board hanging in my kitchen of all the things I need to do in the week. My marker board has three sections: things I need to do in the office, things I need to do outside of the office, and the people I need to catch up with for various reasons.
I just finished setting all of that up for this week and now I am sitting down to write this article and it has me thinking about time and money. I sent emails dealing with spending thousands of dollars and planning hundreds of hours of effort on behalf of a few hundred people. I did that sitting right here in my chair. What an amazing time in which we live. We have the chance to organize our resources together and do great things. Just in the last two hours, I made plans to protect children, interview a potential staff person, place a memorial stone in Memorial Park, set the Family Life Center organization on a good course for the foreseeable future, and inform a whole bunch of people about the good things going on at Wayne Street over the next 7 days. I did all of that with the mysterious thing called a Wifi connection. Honestly, 10 years ago, would have thought that was witchcraft.
We live in a time and place where making good use of our resources has never been easier to do. Yet, we still so often manage to squander opportunities to do good. The reason we struggle is just as all of these advancements make it easier to do good, it has also made it easier to be destructive. I was reading some headlines trying to decide what to write about and the vile stuff that filled my newsfeed about made me sick. It is evening and I am watching a beautiful sunset out of my window and I am much more interested in feeling good about the arrangements and connections I was able to make rather than respond to another downer of a situation.
That is what I would like to encourage you to do this week. It is summer and there are so many good things happening, make sure you are investing the goodness that God gave you in things that are uplifting and positive. Your time and money has been graciously given to you by God and the only thing that the Lord asks you to do with those gifts is invest them wisely in good things that make the world a better place. Part of that investment is about making you the best you can be. If you aren’t making good use of your time and money, you are failing to be a good steward of the gifts that God gave you.
So what does your phone calendar and your credit card statement say about you? They tell quite a story. I hope it is one that is worthy of what it costs because once you trade those precious resources in, you are stuck with the choice you made. I pray the same prayer for you that I pray for myself: that all of the time and money that flow through your life are going in a direction that is building a positive and beneficial future for you and your family.
We are thankful for what we have been given. And the best way to express that gratitude is to invest those gifts wisely.