Skittles

I teach a weekly women’s Bible study. Last night, when we met, I gave them a bag of Skittles and asked them to count out 24 of them.

Then I told them that each Skittle represented one hour of their day. Next, I instructed them to group their Skittles according to how they spend their day.

It was interesting, fun, and quite revealing.

Most of the women had extra hours they could not account for. Yet out of a group of eight, not one of them allotted even one Skittle to time spent in prayer, Bible reading, or devotion to God. Naturally, I pointed this out and then told them the following story:

When my husband, Buddy was about 12 years old, he had a job delivering newspapers. He had to get up at 4 a.m. to do his newspaper route before school. When payday came, he gave most of his earnings to his parents who were struggling to make ends meet. But Buddy kept back a small amount for himself and one week he chose to buy his little brother David some M M’s. David was thrilled and ripped the package open right away and started munching. Buddy asked David for one of the M M’s and little David’s response was “No! These are mine!”

My students got the point of the story immediately.

Just as Buddy had given David the whole package and only asked for a small portion back, if we’re not careful, we do the same thing with God. He gives us the gift of 24 hours of life each day, and often we refuse to give God even an hour of the 24.

Part of living every day with Jesus is recognizing our responsibility in maintaining the relationship.

Let’s do our best to share our time with God, after all, it all belongs to Him anyway!