When I first got married, my wife, knowing I loved chocolate chip cookies, lovingly set out to bake me a batch in our brand new oven (It was cherry red for those that know my stylish wife!).  She knew I liked the softer chewy ones, and misunderstanding the instructions for making chewy cookies, she only put one cup of flour in the whole batch.  Well, given that it had three pounds of butter, lard and other heart-stopping ingredients that are still firmly glued to my arteries to this very day, when she baked them, the fats melted and the cookies simply ran off the side of the cookie tin to the bottom of the oven, generating generous amounts of smoke and other carcinogens as they burned on the heating elements below.  But, my wife, ever determined to complete her task, tried another batch of the same batter, only to add fuel to the bottom of the oven-incineration process that was still occurring.  She had added only about a fourth of the flour that was called for.  Flour was the base of the cookies.  The rest simply melted and got burned up without enough of it.  

Time is that way in life.  You need plenty of it in every great tasting life recipe.  When you waste time, you are robbing yourself of something you’ll need later to do important things.  I heard years ago that “Children spell love, ‘t-i-m-e’”.  So, so true!  If you want to love your kiddos and give them the best you’ve got, you’ve got to give them quality time.  You can pour a beautiful house, a wonderful education, parents who love them, lots of activities, and lots of gifts and entertainment into the mixing bowl for them, but if you don’t add plenty of your own kid-focused time, it’ll all end up melting away and running to the bottom of life’s oven to become a smoky, carcinogenic mess.  They need YOUR time.  

Really, it’s the same with all of life’s best recipes.

So, the question I pose to you is: Do you have a time planner—a life planner, that if you lost it, you’d be lost?  Or, is your life so left to the “rut” and happenstance that you don’t need one.  A few weeks ago, at our church-wide retreat, we were challenged by Casey, one of our Campus Ministers and my awesome son, to write a life purpose and to follow it by writing 50 life goals for ourselves.  That IS tough.  And, I’ve written tons of goals my whole life.  But, doing it without looking at any of my previous goal lists was impossible at the time.  I’ve been working on that for the last three weeks and I’m now up to 47 goals.  I’m still not at 50!  

But, I do have a plan and I use a time planner to try to assure the best use of my time.  I don’t want to get to the end of a day, a week, a month, a year, or my life and find that my recipes burned up because I didn’t put enough time into them.  I’m so proud I don’t have to write one of those horribly sad poems I’ve read by other parents about how I wished I’d spent more time with my children.  I did NOT miss my kids growing up.  My wife and I relished EVERY moment.  We made time every day.  Of course, we wish we’d had more, but we poured as much time as humanly possible into our kids.  We've done the same with our marriage.  My wife and I have been married over 33 years now.  We’ve had regular date nights, taken walks together, gone shopping together, taken long and short vacations together, and spent way too much time and money searching for and buying just the right gifts for each other for Christmas, birthdays, etc.  We've also made enough time to work through our tough times.  She’s stuck with me in spite of the crazy guy I am and the crazy journey she’s traveled with me in my life calling and choices.  We’re glued together by life’s flour—time.

There are of course things I should have spent more time on I’m sure, but I can assure you it wasn’t because I didn’t try to use my time wisely.  It wasn’t because I didn’t have goals.  It wasn’t because I hadn’t prioritized my goals.  Somewhere along the line I learned the value of time and planning it.  And, I developed a great aversion to wasting it.  I relish the time I get to have my quiet times with God in front of my fireplace on chilly mornings like this one.  I relish the minutes I get to spend sitting in my recliner working a Sudoku or crossroad puzzle.  I love the time I get to spend reading the sports page.  I love the time I get to spend talking and laughing with my family and friends.  I love the time I get to have with my grown children talking and hanging out.  I love the slow, simple times with my wife.  To do those things though, I have to plan the other responsibilities carefully to get them all done, saving time for the others.  I have basically worked two full-time jobs for almost 20 years now.

I love that I have scores of friends all over whom I love dearly and who I know love me dearly because in our friend-recipe there was plenty of time poured in to build a relationship that didn’t melt and burn up.  In fact, Tana and I just got back from a trip to San Diego to see some aging friends of ours who are retired there and are struggling with poor health and loneliness.  Some other dear friends drove down from Las Vegas to meet and spend time with us there also.  And, we got to spend four days together in one of God’s most beautiful cities seeing and catching up with some of the best friends God has given us.  But it only meant anything because of the time we’ve invested in those relationships over the years.  It was like hot, chewy chocolate chip cookies on a cold December night in front of the fireplace with the ones you love.  There had been plenty of time added there to make them just right!

Do you have a time plan?  Do you have a time planner?  Is your planner/plan so vital to your life that if you lost it, you’d feel a sense of panic?  Have you planned your life and your time by subscribing to the wisdom of God and his best and brightest servants here?  If you want to enjoy life’s chocolate chip cookies at their finest, be sure to make and save enough time for the most important recipes you’ll want to cook up now and later, as God gives you opportunity.

By the way, I got up early the next morning and was in downtown Dallas at the Records Building by 7 a.m. when they first unlocked their doors (Yes, I’d planned to go to bed early enough so that I could get up early enough to beat rush hour and be the first to walk in those doors!).  Fortunately, rather than some dishonest person finding it, one of the workers had put it behind their counter for safe keeping over night, and so I got it back.  Believe me, I praised God the rest of the day!

And finally, be assured that Tana learned early on the art of baking and makes not only some mean chocolate chip cookies but all sorts of goodies, as my waistline can testify to!  She reads recipes carefully and adds enough flour now.  She ought to write a cookbook herself.  I may just try to get her to do that so we could sell it and I wouldn’t have to work so hard.