Pray For Our Pastors

WHAT IS WORTH ALL OUR TIME

After not having any Christian speaking engagements for awhile, I will possibly have three in the next two weeks. In all three, I am marinating on Jesus’ story about how the kingdom of God is like a man who, having found in a field a treasure of incomparable worth, sells all he has to buy it. I’d like to talk about how we invest our resources, and whether it syncs up with the fact that we too have encountered something of incomparable worth, which (who) demands all we have in response. And since I’ll be speaking to college students and young adults in all three cases, I’ll focus less on money and more on another, more valuable resource: time.

We live in a day and age, particularly in our elite academic institutions, where people are busier than ever. We are constantly juggling school and work and friends and family, maxed out on extra-curricular activities and never without two or three things on the side to entertain us if we have even a second of breathing room. Maybe we’re the children of a baby boomer generation that shuttled us from karate practice to swim lessons, and this is the only speed we know. Maybe we’re in an ever-accelerating rat race, and feel we have to keep up. Maybe (as my friend JD conjectures) we’re living in a post-modern society in which life is truly meaningless, and the thought is so depressing that we’ll do anything to keep ourselves preoccupied, lest we stop for a minute to consider the sheer hopelessness of it all.

Whatever the reason, Jesus offers an alternative, another way of living that is so encompassing that it can be compared to something that someone would sell everything to buy. And so the question for anyone who is paying attention in the 21^st century is: what could possibly be worth all my time? It is that question, by God’s grace, I hope to answer.