I’ve always been a fan of the music group, the “Eagles.” Last week I was listening to a song they recorded a few years ago called “Busy Being Fabulous.” Like a lot of songs, it is about love and a marriage that have gone wrong. The problem, at least from the man’s perspective, is that his wife is spending so much of her time with her well-heeled friends that she has no time for him and their kids. He says that she is so “busy being fabulous” that she’s “too busy to think about us.” Then he adds this accusation about the way she uses her time: “You think time is just a magazine.”
Well, "Time" is the name of a magazine. But “time” is more than just a magazine. Time is the stuff of life.
The problem is that we never have enough it. There is an old story about a man riding a bicycle who was getting tired. A friend in a new Corvette stopped on the street to visit with him, and the man on the bike asked him if would give him a pull. The friend agreed to do so, and the man tied a rope to his bike and to the back bumper of the car. He told his friend in the Corvette “If I want you to go faster, I will ring the bell on my bicycle one time. If I want you to maintain the same speed, I will ring the bell twice. And if I want you to slow down, I will ring the bell repeatedly.” With that understanding, they began their journey down the street. After a little while, the guy driving the Corvette forgot that he was towing his friend on the bicycle and began driving at a high rate of speed down the street. As he rounded a curve, he met a policeman. The policeman turned his car around and began to pursue the pair. As he did so, he called in on his radio to headquarters and said, “I am beginning a pursuit. You won’t believe this, but I just met a guy in a Corvette driving 80 miles per hour, and there was a guy on a bicycle behind him ringing a bell trying to pass him.”
Well, we do get into a hurry, don’t we. We have a lot on the agenda of our lives. In fact, we are in such a hurry that we often forget where we are going and why. We lose sight of the most important things in life.
Phillip Gulley said, “Life isn’t about money and big houses, or fancy cars and titles. It’s about family and friends and our relationship with God. We can’t put all of that on our tombstones, so we carve our names and our dates of birth and death and hope that, somewhere between those two dates, life was well-lived.”
I often read in obituaries and hear in funeral sermons that the person who died did so doing what he loved. Most of us would like to reach the end of our lives doing the things that matter the most. But we ought to do that all of our lives, not just at the end of our lives. As Stan Toler said, “That should be true not just of our last breath, but of our latest breath.”
How about you? How do you use your time? Just a reminder—time is more than a magazine.
