Making the Most of Your Time 

Earlier this month I received an email message from a woman actively involved in one of the local churches. She has played a key role in organizing Vacation Bible School (VBS) in recent years. In her message, she expressed her regret in having to announce that she and the rest of the planners had decided to cancel VBS for the second consecutive year. She explained that the quarantine in 2020 left them no choice but to cancel that year. And despite the fact that things are beginning to open up again now, no one during the planning stages earlier this year was able to predict with exact certainty when that was going to happen. Moreover, fundraising for the event was hampered by church closures and tighter budgets due to those closures. The upshot is that VBS will have to be suspended once again, and those who are interested in continuing this vital ministry in the Ionia city square will have to set their sights on 2022.  

I will admit that I was discouraged by what I read. Like many of you, I am eager to see church activity start again after a year that seemed to drag on for an eternity. It is an emotional struggle to enter into the summer months with an empty summer calendar. Later I shared this struggle with a fellow clergy person in the Presbytery. She suggested that ministers and churches ought to reframe what appears to them as an ugly extension of a long year of forced inactivity. Instead, she explained, they ought to use the time to reassess the ministry strategies and practices they employed before the pandemic. What worked? What didn’t work? And why or why not? Of course, we prefer to be active; that is, ideally, we prefer to ask these questions while we are engaging in the practices. But that is not always an option, as we have been realizing. But then, the question arises: Can we make the most of our time? This, after all, is what the author of the Letter of the Ephesians counsels his readers. He writes: “Make the most of your time because the days are evil (5:18).” Many of us have to apply this to ourselves, especially when the temptation to procrastinate or to outright waste our time persists in a world still affected by the pandemic. Perhaps instead of watching one more movie on Netflix or spending one more hour scrolling Facebook posts or watching YouTube videos (a temptation to which I am especially vulnerable), we can develop a discipline to pray. 

Author Henri Nouwen, who developed this discipline, said, “If we really believe not only that God exists, but also that he is actively present in our lives–healing, teaching, and guiding–we need to set aside a time and space to give him our undivided attention.” Even if our summer schedule is not exactly empty, we should still follow Nouwen’s advice, both as individuals and as a church. Let us ask God for wisdom and for a revelation of his will, listening to his voice as we hear it in the pages of Scripture. This certainly can count as making the most of our time. 

Pastor Chris