Michael-Grams: M-G: 2.20.23 // You Got a Second

Before I start, let me get this call…

I was having a conversation with someone the other day, and he got a call on his cell. I was asked to “hang on a minute.” While I was waiting, I was thinking humorously to myself, “Time waits for no man!” Obviously, it was a figure of speech, but this waiting went beyond minutes. He apologized as I finally got up from my seat and excused myself; the phone was still in his ear as I was going out the door. He told me later the call lasted over an hour!

If we are given the impossible task to hang on to the time when requested, we are deemed impatient or rude. Maybe the person who told us to hold on for a minute was rude for treating our time as invaluable. What is voice mail for nowadays? Everything is deemed a “potential emergency,” yes? If this person was upfront with me at the beginning of our conversation and said, “Michael, I am expecting a very important call at any time. So, I may have to end our conversation abruptly. I want to apologize in advance in the event this happens.”

You know; I’m cool with that; life doesn’t revolve around me. Unfortunately, many people are not that adept at cell phone etiquette. Often conversations are disrupted simply because a person felt compelled to answer! What makes this situation even more aggravating is when someone called the wrong number, or it was a spam call. You think to yourself, “You disrupted our meeting for that!?”

The art of engagement is a thing of the past! Sometimes, it’s best just to put our phones on mute and set them aside to have an uninterrupted conversation, yes? Ever tried to talk to someone who is holding their cell phone and constantly looking down at their phone; there is no eye contact. I wanted to ask, “Am I boring you?” I am tired of people multitasking and saying to me, “I hear you!” I would fire back, “You may hear me, but you are not listening!” I feel like I am a part of background noise, nothing more.

What I do find offensive is for the other party to receive a call as you are talking to them, and they casually drift away from you as if you are no longer around! You are left standing or sitting there twirling your thumbs! Sometimes, I think such people are acting like a single-celled (no pun intended) microbe that eats all the good thoughts in your brain at the moment, leaving only negative waste. It is such a joy not running into those kinds of people who do not value your time. If this person is a believer, he or she is acting more like an amoeba rather than a Christian.

And get this! Should you confront them later about their insensitivities, they will usually think that you have a problem, not them! You get the feeling after bringing it to their attention that they are offended by you being offended by their offense! The closer we draw to that 7-year tribulation period spoken of in Scripture; the more twisted people are becoming. It’s simply madness! People are unsure of their gender; men can have babies; hatred and violence abound, et cetera! Yep, sounds like future tribulation inhabitants of planet dearth to me.

After pleading for others to step away from their cell phone and have a decent conversation, we have allowed that person to live rent-free in our heads, if we are not careful, until we can evict them in the name of Jesus. I guess I’m a bit too touchy, but I don’t like being disengaged from another person over a superfluous phone call, and I will never like it.

That is not the way to treat people as if their time is of little to no importance, only theirs! God help you if you treated them the way they are treating you, yes? If we acted like them, then we would be guilty of literally trashing or wasting their time. Why should this be concerning to us more than it is? Because if you think about it, time or life is the most valuable commodity anyone has; it’s not the material stuff. We need to respect people’s time by bringing only value to their lives. Are they the better for meeting with us?

Time travels at a basic rate of sixty seconds a minute, right? The pace is slow (try holding your breath for sixty seconds), dreadfully slow, but it is constant and set in motion by the Creator of us all. It laughs at us when we turn the clocks back or forward one hour!

This speed reminds me of being lulled into mental complacency by the ticking noise of a grandfather clock that has a weight-driven pendulum. But the life clock we are talking about is magical. While each second clicks on that grandfather clock, lifetime takes on a speed of its own by divine design (cf. 2 Pet 3:8). In the meantime, lifetime is as a vapor (cf. Jas 4:14) while each second keeps its cadence of sixty seconds a minute.

We have an unalarming sense that life is passing by with each second, but the speed of lifetime accelerates beyond comprehension and calculation as the seconds add up. We are so intensely focused on living that one day we all will come to realize that the very second you and I became self-aware of the speed of lifetime, we just traveled through 2,207,520,000 seconds (70 years, not counting leap years), with no Heb 9:27 event, of course! Perhaps an analogy may help here.

With a flare of C.S. Lewis, it is like two young brothers wanting to see time fly. So, one threw a clock from the floor above down to his brother at the bottom of the stairs. The moment the brother on the first floor caught the clock; they were both seventy years of age. The bulk of their life passed away in a flash! In utter shock, these old men got their wish as boys to see how time flies (cf. Ps 90:10). Oh, if we would only ask Yahweh to teach us to number our days and be wise with our time for His glory given the brevity of life (cf. Psa 90:12; Prov 10:27; Eph 5:16; Col 4:5)!

I have told a similar story before, in another time piece, of an older gentleman twenty years my elder. We were walking along the nursery in church. Pointing to the nursery, I told him, “You and I were there just the other day being checked into the nursery. Now, we are hobbling back home.” He had that quizzical look about him. Then he got the brevity of life lesson. I didn’t have the heart to remind him that he was older than dirt!

Behind those hard seconds, lifetime moves at a faster, immeasurable, and uncomfortable pace as a vapor (Jas 4:14). The transience of life somewhere down the line hits you with a hard reality check. My dad once asked a rhetorical question at the age of 64 in my presence, “Where did the time go?” He did it one other time that I know of, “Where did the time go?” when he was 94. He died less than two months shy of his 95^th birthday last year.

Ask yourself this question, “Am I guilty of mistreating the time of other people given its transient nature?” How about this one, “Am I wasting my own time by consuming it for me rather than for the glory of God (cf. 1 Cor 10:31)? Like James, the Apostle Paul gave some great advice about time,

Live life, then, with a due sense of responsibility, not as men who do not know the meaning and purpose of life but as those who do. Make the best use of your time, despite all the difficulties of these days. Don’t be vague but firmly grasp what you know to be the will of God (Eph 5:15-17, JB Phillips).

The will of God is that we don’t waste our time or the time of others because once it goes by, it is gone forever in a heartbeat though the cadence of time runs at a snail-pace of 60 seconds a minute. Make no mistake; lifetime flies. What we do for the glory of God lasts forever; all other endeavors end up as smoke. Time invested in the will of God is the wisest thing you and I will ever do after salvation (Jn 3:3).

As you would have others treasure your time, treasure their time likewise because tomorrow we are out of here, and the BEMA or the judgment seat of Christ is all about examining the quality of our time in service to the Lord. We should be careful how we toss our seconds around, yes? We don’t get them back.1 You got a second? <><