Time Well Spent

Time Well Spent

You will always harvest what you plant.

Galatians 6:7

Recently a 1943 wristwatch giving the time in forty-two cities around the world was sold at auction for 6.6 million Swiss francs. That’s over five million US dollars! The eighteen-karat gold wristwatch, made by Geneva watchmaker Patek Philippe, was sold to an unidentified buyer.

Can you imagine spending five million dollars on a watch? How about five thousand dollars? Five hundred? Okay, fifty? We all know that the Timex you spent a few bucks on is going to keep nearly as good a time as the Patek Philippe model—maybe not in forty-two different cities around the world, but it will keep decent time. So why would someone spend that kind of cash on such an exotic watch? Obviously, it’s not about keeping time. It’s about appreciating quality. It’s about the fine art of time keeping. It’s about an investment. A significant investment.

The news of this extraordinary purchase got us to thinking about the value of our time as a couple and how we invest it. We began to wonder aloud about the time in our life, and it didn’t take us long to realize that the time that is most precious to us is the time we have together. Certainly the time we spend at work is important and often fulfilling. The time we spend at church in worship with others is deeply meaningful. We thoroughly enjoy the time we have with friends. But the most valuable of all our time is the time we devote to our marriage and family. It’s priceless.

What gives the time a husband and wife have together such extraordinary value? It’s the return on the investment: love, the most valuable resource in the universe. Love is the summum bonum—the supreme good, the most excellent way. Love lifts us outside ourselves and allows us to see beyond the normal range of human vision. It inspires us to transcend who we are tempted to settle for in this life. It defines us and shapes us into the persons we were designed to be. No financial investment in the world can pay that kind of a dividend. And no marriage can ever reap the bountiful rewards of this love without the investment of time. To love and be loved you must spend time with the one you love; as you do, love has the chance to compound.

Nothing, not even a five-million-dollar timepiece, can come close to what a husband and wife get from the investment of time together. So as you meditate on the readings in this book, do so together. Consider each one an investment in your love fund. And consider this question: What’s one specific difference in your relationship you observe between days when you have time to connect versus those days when time is in short supply?

The way you spend your hours and your days is the way you spend your life.

—John Boykin