She sat at home, rocking. The tip of her toe brushing the floor, just keeping the chair going.
The baby sighed in his sleep. His chubby hand closing around her thin finger.
In the corner, the massive mahogany grandfather clock swung its gold trimmed pendulum in its steady unchanging arch.
Tick….. tock……
Tick….. tock…..
The long, ornately scrolled hand was just brushing the twelve. The short hand pointed to the eleven. She looked from the clock to the sleeping baby and back to the clock.
She was young, sort of.
She had been pretty once, and it still showed. She was trim and her eyes were large and expressive, but there were premature lines across her forehead and between her eyes.
She glanced at the hand-carved end table where the massive leather-bound Bible rested that they used for family devotions. How long since it had been opened?
She tucked a wisp of hair under her covering and sighed, running a trembling finger across the chubby sleeping face on her lap.
Behind the heavy glass clock face, the long hand pointed to the twelve. Inside its massive mahogany case, she heard the clock works gearing up to strike.
Dong….
Its heavy melodious voice echoing through the big house: solemn, majestic.
Dong….
It reflected from the glass front of the long, quarter-sawn oak china hutch and glanced off the polished hickory flooring.
Dong….
It reverberated across the granite countertops and glanced back and forth inside the small space between the stainless-steel fridge and the copper-hooded oven where he always put his soft sided lunch pail. There was nothing there now to absorb the sound.
Dong….
It slipped over the polished stair banister and bounced off the mirror of the polished but unused antique washstand that stood in the upstairs hall.
Dong….
Its ponderous beat circled the hall landing and poked itself into rooms.
Dong….
Upstairs, a child whimpered in his sleep. His little hands reaching out as if for someone and, finding nothing, descended to his chest to wad the little blanket under his inarticulately murmuring chin.
Dong…
Slightly slower now, but ponderous in its strikes.
Dong….
It shouldered its way into a large master bath, glancing off the tile walls and making the hand-worked bronze hook where he always hung his hat vibrate when nothing was on it. It was empty now.
He was a good steward. Everybody said so. Hadn’t he started with one small farm and now had several?
Didn’t men come to him for advice when they faced financial decisions they were unsure of?
Yes, he was a good steward. Everybody said so. The clock gathered itself, its spring tension nearly spent.
Dong…
She jerked awake. Sleeping between strokes. Lights crested the hill, and she glanced towards them, her face a mixture of hope and pain.
Dong….
The lights passed.
Dong….
The last stroke reverberated through the big house. She sighed, knowing a business project had kept him out yet again.
She should count herself fortunate. At least she wasn’t like Lucy, who had to scrape for grocery money because her man could never make ends meet.
Yes, she should be thankful. He was a good steward.
Everybody said so.
At least everybody who didn’t really know him…
****
Stewardship is so often viewed as a financial thing alone. It is not.
Stewardship is what we do with the resources God has placed under our control.
Time is the most important asset we have. A person might live a lifetime without money. They can live not at all without time. Time is the stuff life is made of.
A view of stewardship that encompasses money but does not account for time is a waste.
It has often been said by the hard-nosed and beady eyed that “time is money” with the conviction of quoting scripture.
It is not true. Time is worth infinitely more than money. God made time. Man made money. A person can theoretically have an infinite amount of money.
I just checked. As of today1, Elon’s Musk’s net worth is 447 billion. He is the first person in history to have a net worth of over 400 billion.
Let’s say he’d live for another 40 years. He’s 53 now.
How much would he have to spend an hour to spend 447 billion?
Well, that would be a little over 11 billion per year, 30.6 million per day and so, almost 1.3 million per hour, every hour, seven days a week for the next forty years
For most practical day-to-day purposes, that could be considered inexhaustible wealth.
But…. He’s running out of time. He’s stunningly effective with his time. He doesn’t sit around in pointless meetings. He gets an insane amount of work done. Splitting his time between his massive companies, Tesla Motors, Space X, Twitter, Neuralink and his new AI company, he acts decisively and efficiently. He’s a master at time usage…. But his life is almost certainly more than half gone. It may be much more than that. In contrast, a baby born in the US this year has a life expectancy of 76.4 years.
So even if that new baby at church drooling on her daddy’s hand only lives to normal life expectancy, she’ll still be around decades after Elon Musk is a fading memory. His money may be inexhaustible, but his time is not.
Time is scarce. Time is diminishing. We can’t save time. It is steadily draining away even as we fruitlessly plot to save more of it.
We can’t save it, store it, or hoard it. We can only use it. Ah, but yes. Use it, we can. And use it we must, wisely.
We will give an account for it all.
Let’s go back to that mother sitting alone in the big house, to see again the tired face, the worry lines, the child whimpering in his sleep upstairs.
The man was a good steward, everybody said. Did they ask his wife? Where was he when his family needed him? Was he so busy growing his wealth that he forgot to steward his time?
We were sent into this world to love. To care. To form beautifully synergistic marriages that show the relationship of Christ and his church. To raise up children for the kingdom. To show the world through our families what God’s care over his children looks like.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” we intone and nod solemnly when we are admonished to “take no thought for the morrow.”
Then we get back to our planning, not for tomorrow but for the next decade…. or the next.
It’s not in my place to be critical of another. God knows that I have enough faults of my own without looking over my neighbor’s fence. So, let’s examine it together. I wonder, are we stewarding our time well? Do you, like me, find yourself thinking I really need to spend more time with my family? Or maybe be better focused and present when we are there. Or maybe it’s a shortage of time to have a real devotional life. Or time to sit down and hear all about your wife’s day and fill her in on yours?
What’s stopping us? What would we have to sacrifice in order to do that?
That extra job you just quoted? Would you have to sell the camper or that piece of hunting property? Move to a smaller house with a lower payment? Sell our business shares? Lower our lifestyle. Stop reading books at home because we are unavailable when reading?
These are fair questions.
Many businesses wouldn’t think of operating year after year with no accounting system. Do we sometimes run year after year without an account of the hours of our day? What did you do this morning between 5-6 A.M.? 6-7? 7-8? 8-9? Are we too busy for lunch? How much time did you take for family supper? The average mealtime in America used to be 90 minutes. A full hour and a half.
When’s the last time you took an hour and a half meal with your family?
Yesterday, you say? And the day before that?
I think you’re my new hero. I’m impressed. Honestly, I am.
Because it’s not easy to do.
For a while we had a tradition of lighting the supper candle. Every night a different child would get to light the tall bees wax candle in the middle of the table and that child got to pick the supper prayer… and then talk first afterward. To tell us about their day. They got to unpack their day to all of us. Naturally that led to squirming and huffing from some other quarters “because it didn’t happen like that, he’s not telling it right” but the survival rate was high even if the others had to sit on their version of the story for a few more minutes.
We did this other thing occasionally after supper called “rolling the orange”. A child would start with the orange and roll it across the table to someone else. Then they would ask the new orange holder any question they wanted. What is your favorite truck? What do you want to be when you grow up?
After all the questions were asked and answered, that day’s child got to blow out the candle.
They loved it, asking, “Can we roll the orange tonight?”
Then we kind of got away from it. Travel interfered and somehow it got dropped. I think it’s time to bring it back.
But it takes discipline… and time.
And so often we “haven’t got the time.”
We have church tonight, or school board meeting, or… or etc., etc.
The truth is, we haven’t aggressively budgeted time for it the last while. Because it needs to be budgeted for.
And why do so many people budget money but not consciously budget time when time is unquestionably more important?
How can we free up more time?
Do we have any resources we can “turn into time”?
Can we turn that extra vehicle in the lane into time for family devotions?
How much do you sell your time for?
$15 an hour? 30? 50? 100?
Let’s say you make 50 dollars an hour. That may be high for many hourly workers and a low for many business owners, but let’s go with that.
So that rarely used vehicle in the yard is worth $15,000. If you sold it and aggressively invested it into family time, it would “buy” (redeem) you 300 hours. Nearly an hour a day for a year.
What dividends will that extra vehicle be paying you in 30 years? What about that extra hour a day for your family?
Because it is an investment. A management. In short, a stewardship.
Elon Musk is very efficient at using his time…. to accomplish amazing things and to make money. But… to make a good family? Well, he has 11 living children with 6 different women. What do you think of that stewardship?
In 100 years, will he still think he stewarded his time well?
****
Whether it is fact or fiction, the story has come down to us.
The queen was dying. In the great palace room draped with the finest of everything, she lay, breathing slowly, laboriously.
The doctor leaning over her straightened and looking at the ladies-in-waiting, shook his head. “It will not be long now. She’s fading fast.”
She was the great queen Elizabeth. The queen, who under her rule, America was settled by the English. She’d inherited a kingdom virtually bankrupt, fragmented and widespread problems with religious persecution and dissention.
Under her reign she allowed more religious freedom, bound the kingdom together and brought economic prosperity and wealth to England. Her personal wealth was enormous. But… now she was dying.
She stirred and those around her leaned in. Her eyes opened wide. “All,” she breathed, “all that I possess for a moment of time.” Then slowly sank back as her last seconds slipped away. She had enormous wealth but even she couldn’t buy more time.
Let’s return now to the young mother sitting alone in the big house waiting for her husband to come home. To the child whimpering in his sleep because daddy wasn’t home at bedtime, again.
Was he really a good steward? Was he?
But listen………… the clock is striking.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Darryl Derstine lives in Holmes County Ohio with his wife and 7 children. He works at Christian Aid Ministries Foundation and CAM Books. He can be reached at bss@camoh.org, or 330-893-4915.
1 Taken from the Business Insider 12/12/24.
