George McGovern, one-time presidential candidate, wrote a book about his daughter Terry who died of alcoholism. In 1994 she was found frozen to death in a snow bank where she’d fallen in a drunken stupor.
After his daughter died, McGovern poured over Terry’s diaries and talked to her friends trying to figure out what she was thinking. He discovered that he was not as good a father as he thought he had been. While he was spending 18-hour days fighting for political causes, his daughter Terry was at home writing in her diary that she missed her daddy. But he probably didn’t miss her because he probably didn’t care about her.
As he reflected on this he wrote, “I’d give everything I have – and I mean everything – for one more afternoon with Terry. Just to tell her how much I love her and have one more of those happy times that we used to have all too infrequently.”
There are all kinds of things literally crying for our time. May God help us to use our time on what matters most. We need to nurture our relationship with God, nurture our relationship with our family, and build and establish loving relationships with the people around us.
The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time.