SubscribeFaithfully using our time
My brother, George, a gregarious guy who often speaks at our family reunions as well as for professional groups, loves to recite Dr. Benjamin E. Mays’s poem, “God’s Minute.” It has become his signature, so much a part of him that when he doesn’t include it in a speech I feel something is missing.
George passed its recitation on to his grandson, Brandon, who used the poem in a speech he gave at his high school graduation two years ago. “He learned it at his grandfather’s knee,” George quipped with patriarchal pride. George even has been known to blurt out the poem when someone is taking too long at the Scrabble table.
For the last three days, I could hear my brother’s voice delivering these words with an easy rolling cadence. I could see his lips part into a knowing smile as he began:
I’ve only just a minute
Only sixty seconds in it.
Forced upon me, can’t refuse it,
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,
But it’s up to me to use it.
must suffer if I lose it,
Give an account if I abuse it,
Just a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it.
Dr. May’s poem is not just some nice little ditty that my older brother loves to repeat for the pleasure of his audiences. It is a challenge for all of us to make the best of each moment that God gives us and to live our lives with purpose. As we live a life of faith, we determine to trust God with our time, our talents and our treasures and to let Him guide us in how we use them second by second. It means giving God and the people in our lives the best that we have to offer.
Dr. Mays was a gifted orator, intellectual, minister and educator who served as president of Morehouse College for 27 years. He mentored Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his college years, as well as countless other men and women. My brother, Earl, a Morehouse man, was also a fan of Dr. Mays and student of his philosophy of living out one’s higher calling.
“The satisfied life is the dying life,” Dr. Mays’s intoned in a 1959 commencement address. No one –student, teacher, preacher, doctor, artist–who is satisfied with what they do will ever be better, he said.
“Finally….let us create in ourselves a divine discontentment, a divine restlessness, an eternal dissatisfaction with mediocrity. Let us declare war on the average.”
His words remain applicable today.
I don’t recall hearing Dr. Mays speak, though I lived in Atlanta during the mid-1970s when he was serving on the Atlanta School Board. (My memory is so bad.) But I hear him now, through my brother’s narration. My goal is to be better today than I was yesterday. I am taking up the challenge anew to live each second to God’s glory.
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