Live Wise – Manage Your Time

“Be very careful, then, how you live- not as unwise but as wise, making the most out of every opportunity, because the days are evil”. Eph. 5:15-16.

Recently, I took a Macro Economics class; it was interesting because I understood the bigger picture of how the economy of a country runs. Two terms that got my attention were Scarcity and Opportunity cost. Scarcity is the limited availability on something on demand, for example, toilet paper when the pandemic began. Opportunity cost is the option we decline when we choose to go with another option, for example, pizza is an opportunity cost when we decide to go with Chinese food.

Thinking about these meanings, I realized that one way of making the most out of every opportunity is managing our resources. Human resources are limited, and one of our biggest and highly demanded resources is Time. Everything demands our time: our studies, jobs, children, parents, spouses, friends, entertainment, even our need to eat and to sleep.

It is important to understand, that because of our limited time, when we choose something, we’re forsaking something else. Thus, we need to be very careful about how we spend our time, being prudent with our schedules. From the minute we wake up until we go to bed, we face hundreds of decision- making situations about time management that are going to impact our lives even in the smallest ways: Bible or Instagram? Homework or shopping? Small Bible group or Netflix? Family or distractions? With each decision we make, we forgo the other one.

Paul is encouraging us to live as wise not as unwise. It’s hard sometimes to know which direction to go. In those cases, we need to remember that the Bible says wisdom starts with the fear of the Lord. (Prov. 1:7)

If you’re struggling today about how to spend your time or go through the current season, the first decision you need to make is to spend some time with the Lord. As you do so, He will give you wisdom and freedom to make the other decisions ahead, just one at a time. He doesn’t want you to be overwhelmed, He just wants you to rely on Him.

God has placed us here with a purpose to accomplish, and one of the ways of doing it is removing every distraction and being disciplined about making the best use out of our times. In some situations is as simple as taking 5 mins to go to our bedroom in quiet to be able to recharge to handle our kids, or maybe not taking that extra credit class because it’d create too much stress, thus hurting our relationship with others.

Organizing our schedule during a season doesn’t have to do with doing a lot – sometimes it might be doing less so we can hear the voice of God, learn to be grateful, and be a blessing to others.

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