Every family wants more of it, yet no family gets more or less than anyone else. The start of a new year reminds us of one of our most valuable God-given resources—Time.
Every family gets the same: 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,766 hours, and 525,960 minutes each year.
We’ve just completed the first month of 2025. How’s your family doing at managing the gift of your time?
While you can never get more time, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make more of the time that you have been given.
Here are three things to remember as you evaluate the use of your time personally as a parent, and collectively as a family.
1. You CAN create more time.
Even though you can’t make more time… You can creatively create more time by redeeming the time you have, creating greater margin, and getting more intentional with your weeks, hours, minutes, and moments (Eph. 5:16).
“Success is in the seconds… (successful) people have the same calendar you and I have but they have learned something that took me decades to figure out. Minutes matter…. Years are made of minutes and there are a lot of those hidden within everyday.” -Jon Acuff
We can easily waste 30+ minutes a day in useless scrolling on our phones, yet make excuses for why we don’t have time to have genuine conversations with our kids, or to pray together as a family.
If we’re being honest, most of the things that matter that we aren’t doing, aren’t because of a lack of time, but a lack of priority.
How could your family create more margin with the time you have this week by better managing your minutes?
2. You WILL spend your time.
Time is unforgiving. It passes without regard for how it’s used. Learn to spend your time wisely.
An easy way to remember this is to budget your time like you would your money.
What if you were given $525,960 dollars to spend this year rather than minutes? How would you choose to manage that?
Just like money, the things you have to do will always be greater than the time you have to do them. You must prioritize how you spend time.
Your time is rare and scarce, therefore it’s valuable. Every hour you spend on something is one of your only 24 each day that you’ll never reclaim.
Factor in sleep, work, errands, ect., and you may only have a few hours each day to spend on your family. That makes that time rare, which ought to make that time precious and valuable to you.
“Your time is expensive. Don’t voluntarily give it to things that don’t deserve it.”
Spend your time with extravagant generosity on the things and people that do deserve it. Your family should be one of those areas.
Spend your time carefully and cautiously on things that don’t matter. Social media, Netflix, or regularly working extra hours to pay for things you really don’t need shouldn’t be the areas that get your extravagant generosity with your precious time.
Such times need to be intentional, not indulgent. The more you learn to value your time the more you’ll come to realize what does and doesn’t deserve it.
How can your family spend your time more intentionally this week on things more eternal than temporal?
3. You MUST protect your time.
A biblical perspective of your time will help you to recognize it’s enemies so that you can protect against them. Here are two of them:
The Comfort Zone… “Comfort is an amazing place to visit but a terrible place to live.” -Jon Acuff… Don’t live in or for the comfort zone. Enjoy every moment, even the not so-comfortable ones. (Phil. 4:4, I Thess. 5:18).
Our family loves good movies (what family doesn’t, right?)! However, we’ve identified evening TV time as a comfort zone with the potential to be an enemy of better things if we’re not intentional.
The Complacent Zone… Complacency with your time leads to mediocrity with your life. Hard things take time and work (you’re going to have to give up something), but the more time you invest into something hard, the better you naturally become at it.
I spoke with a friend this past week whose family just finished reading through the entire Bible in 30 days! They killed the comfort zone (it took nearly an hour and a half daily), and they crushed the complacent zone (reading through the Bible in a single month is hard… but possible!)
It’s only the start of February, so good news!… You still have 11 months left in 2025. It’s time to take back your God-given time as a family and make it count.
How can your family better protect your time from the enemies of the comfort zone and complacent zone?
For the good of man and the glory of God, let’s create, spend, and protect our time well!
Redeeming the time, because the days are evil. -Ephesians 5:16
