Time Together

Where has your beloved gone . . . ? Where has your beloved turned aside . . . ?

Song Of Solomon 6:1

Marriage counselors are concerned about the scant amount of time husbands and wives spend with each other and their children during the course of a week. We’re a busy generation. In olden times, families spent vast chunks of time together in the farmhouse and around the barn and in the fields. Today the average family hardly has time to eat a hurried meal together, and that’s often done in the car after someone tosses food to us through the window at a drive-through.

A team of counselors recently suggested that any marriage can be improved by committing to a thirty/thirty plan—spending thirty minutes together for thirty days. We have to be intentional about scheduling time to protect priceless moments with those most precious to us. Block in date nights, family times, camping trips, regular meals, getaway weekends, and reading times with your youngsters at bedtime.

Even Solomon and Shulamith had trouble spending time with each other in Song of Solomon. The problem is as old as the Bible, but the solution is as modern as a good calendar.

The disciple of Christ is to be an expert merchant in the commodity of time.

J. H. JOWETT^a