Time Keeps on Ticking...

My son Daniel has been saving his money for a new video game: Lego Star Wars - The Complete Saga. As of last week's allowance, he hit the mark and we stopped at Circuit City after school yesterday to make the purchase.

It's actually a fairly cool game. You take your little Lego Star Wars characters through all six movies, unlocking various Sith Lords, et al, as you go. When not fighting the forces of the dark side, you hang out in the Cantina Bar with all of the other Star Wars Universe guys and that peppy song plays in the background. ("No blasters! No Blasters!")

The Cantina Bar also has another interesting feature, not uncommon in video games these days: a counter that tells you exactly how much time you have spent on the game thus far. I was appalled to discover that before I had even gotten settled in for the evening, Daniel had logged four plus hours at this game.

I wonder....what would it be like if everything in our lives came with a similar kind of counter? We would always be reminded of how much time we were spending on our marriage, our job, our church, our kids, our selves. What would we change if we were regularly reminded of how much, or how little, of our time we actually spend on the things that matter the most?

Rick Warren says you can tell what a person values most by what he spends his time on, because time is the only thing we spend with no hope of ever getting back.

I read a beautiful passage in a book once - it was the story of a couple who met when the man offered the woman a handkerchief. They later fell in love, got married, had a family, and spent a wonderful life together. Then one day - boom - the man dies. He was not young, but his passing was still unexpected and sudden. As the woman prepares for the funeral, she thinks "The moment he handed me that handkerchief, a clock started ticking somewhere. I just never heard it."

Can we ever fully hear the clocks ticking in our own lives?