Redeeming the Time

Redeeming the time is the theme I’ve thought of for this 15 minute excursion.  I don’t know if it will last for the whole exercise, but that’s what we’re starting with.  Pastor Damron preached a sermon on this theme from Ephesians 5:16 Sunday night and got me thinking along these lines.  What does that phrase mean?  Most of the time when I think of redeeming something I think of buying something back.  For some reason I think of making right something that has been wrong or regaining something that has been lost.  But this is just not possible when the object is time.  There is no possible way to recover time.  So I think here, it must mean just to buy or to buy up. Then, what is time?  PD said this was opportunities. This makes sense and without doing any word study, I’ll take his definition. How do we buy opportunities?  When we go to the store for groceries, we do not buy everything in the store. We don’t buy everything we could use. We normally buy what we need. Now if the purchase was going to cost us a significant amount of money (more than just groceries), we would do some studying to make sure we got the best deal for our money.  Somehow I think this concept is related here.  In his sermon, PD noticed the proximity of the command to the instructions concerning our families and encouraged us to buy up opportunities in our families. This is definitely something of more value than groceries. I think of parents, particularly fathers, that find themselves very busy providing for their family physically but struggling to provide socially, emotionally, and spiritually.  In this sense, don’t just buy any opportunity that comes along, seek the “best deals.”  Your time is precious, make the most of the time you have.  Eat dinner with your family if possible.  Make the dinnertime special.  There’s more going on there than physical refueling.  Take the time you daydream at work to plan useful and productive times, even if short, with your children. Think in your mind about how to ask them questions that will let you learn how they are doing spiritually, socially, and emotionally. There are many things we can do in this area. It seems to me that we should do more planning of our conversations, interactions, than our activities. I guess this is sort of saying redeem the time you are away from your family so that the time you are with your family is of highest value. At the same time, I would suggest not over-critiquing yourself over times spent with your family. Think, plan, and pray about the interactions you have with them and then, by faith, follow through. We can’t be perfect all the time, but if we’re not perfect we can be attempting.  Don’t not try, because of fear of failure. So look for the best opportunities to buy up and then capitalize on them (there’s a unique combination of terms – they both have to do with money).  Well I’ve exhausted my crammed up thoughts on this topic, I think I’ll try to edit this some before posting it, but that will have to come after the timer goes off.