In The Effective Father, Gordon McDonald relates a story about James Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson. Boswell often referred to a childhood memory of a day he spent fishing with his father. On that special day, his father taught him many insights that Boswell treasured for life. Many years later, someone looked up this particular day in the journal that Boswell’s father kept to see what his father recorded about this significant experience in the life of his son. The journal entry for that day had only one sentence: “Gone fishing today with my son; a day wasted.”
It is ironic that this man regarded what may have been his most significant investment as a waste of time. Scripture teaches that people are eternal beings who are appointed to a resurrection of life or a resurrection of judgment (John 5:28-29; Daniel 12:2). Since this is so, the time we invest in cultivating relationships by loving and serving people is never wasted.
The resources of time, talent, and treasure the Lord has entrusted to us are never ends in themselves. The wise steward learns to leverage these temporal resources into eternal good, and this is accomplished by learning and living the Word of God and by building our lives into people.
Taken from Ken Boa’s Handbook to Spiritual Growth
