Time to Love – October 29, 2000
How many people push forward each day, preoccupied with business and thinking only of their schedules? They invest time in what’s essential to them, but have no time saved for others.
It’s easy for some to ignore or set aside family problems that demand too much of that precious time. That was the situation of parents with a child having trouble in school. They sent her from counselor to counselor looking for someone who would take over the problem for them. “We are very busy people,” they said, “and we don’t have time for this.”
These parents had time for the things they considered essential. What seemed to be a lack of time was really a lack of patience and interest in their daughter’s problems.
Jealously guarding our time and dispensing it only in stingy spoonfuls won’t sustain our most important relationships. One gray winter dawn, a passerby saw an elderly woman picking up small pieces of discarded lumber on the outskirts of a building site. It was a sad picture to see her scouring the ground for bits of wood to take home for a fire. But even sadder is the picture that the most important people in our lives—our families—might be begging for scraps of our attention while we focus on other things. Sometimes the best part of our day is given over to things that don’t really matter, and those that are most important get only the leftovers.
Investing ourselves in our most precious relationships will bring the highest returns—lifelong and eternal benefits. These benefits stem from friendship and family links in a chain of love that can stretch over generations. Those links are welded by making time for sharing, time for listening, and time for love.
Harold B. Lee put it in perspective when he said, “The most important work that you will ever do will be within the walls of your own home.”1
Program #3715
1. In Conference Report, Mexico and Central America Area Conference 1972, 77.