For Sale: Free Time

Do you want more free time? Then you must buy it. Free time is never free.

There are only four ways you can buy free time:

1. Work fewer hours. Learn to say no. You'll have more free time immediately.

Cost: Lost opportunities, reduced income.

2. Develop systems, methods and procedures that save time.

Cost: Time and money spent in developing those systems, methods and procedures.

3. Recruit, hire, train and manage other people to do your work for you.

Cost: Time and money spent in recruiting, hiring, training and managing.

I heartily recommend these three methods. But I recommend against number four:

4. Be the recipient of a large inheritance or insurance settlement, win the lottery, marry a rich person.

Cost: Loss of identity, loss of self.

That last statement will surely win me a flurry of emails from angry “happy people” who married someone rich. “How dare you say that! I married a rich person and my life has been full and complete.” Okay, so you're the rare exception. But I'm sure you'll agree that money is an insulator. It shields us from problems, and perhaps that's good. But it shields us from challenges as well. Money is the glove that keeps us from feeling the texture and ripples of life.

Nothing is so rewarding as making a difference. Especially when it involves self-sacrifice. But when a challenge can be overcome by the mere stroke of your pen, the reward always seems less intimate. Is this perhaps what Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven?” (Note to Anxious Expositors: that question was rhetorical. I'm not really asking what Jesus meant, okay?)

In the tenth chapter of Mark's history, a wealthy young man asks Jesus how to receive life. Mark tells us, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”

Okay, so far so good. Jesus really likes this guy and wants to help him experience the visceral joy he craves. “One thing you lack,” Jesus said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and come, follow me.”

Mark reports the young man walked away sad. Removing the glove of wealth was, for him, a price too high to pay for joy.

Please note that neither Mark nor I are insinuating that it was the young man's moral duty to liquidate his holdings. Jesus was merely pointing out the high emotional cost of wearing the glove of wealth.

What's my point? Only this: excitement and reward exist only outside your comfort zone. You'll experience neither of them until you make yourself do something you really don't want to do.

So what is it that scares the hell out of you?

Roy H. Williams