Timing and Value

That magnificent thing you bought two weeks ago is now up to 90% off. Now you can buy it for just about the tax you paid on it.

Why the sudden decrease in value?

It's all about the timing.

If real estate is location, location, location.
Retail sales are timing.

This happens at the end of every season. Right now the boxes of assorted chocolates wrapped in Christmas paper are 75-90% off and just one aisle over are the same box of chocolates wrapped in Valentine's paper and full price! (Not to say as a shopper that there are not certain advantages to everything going out of season so quickly as conceptually you can restock your Christmas supplies now and pack them away for next year but that's not exactly my point.)

There is a time for things.

Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3 gave us a whole litany about it, a time for laughter, for crying, for work, for play, for war, for peace...you know the passage and you get the idea.

When things are done in the proper time, they are powerful.

Something as simple as putting lights on your house for Christmas is a beautiful thing, yet not so much in April...
Are the lights still as lovely? Sure, but now they've lost beauty and become an oddity because their time was Christmas and it is long passed.

One thing whose value is strongly tied to timing is our words.
As Proverbs 25:11 says "A word fitly (or timely) spoken is like apples of gold in baskets of silver." Not just any word and not just at any time but the right word at the right time.

It's happened to you hasn't it; you think of the perfect response or retort (depending on the nature of the conversation!) about an hour after you're away from the situation?

What about the times when it's in our power to say an encouraging word and we don't and although we can say it later the need for it has passed and the strength one would have derived from it is no longer?

Or what of a word of rebuke or of truth when it is prudent but we don't say what we ought and then the consequences that follow are reflective of our silence? Or perhaps we should have offered a word of witness but let fear keep us from sharing our hope?

We all know someone, if not ourselves, who has lost someone else and regrets not saying "I love you" more often or that one last time. We live as though we and everyone around us will live forever, but we know differently. We need how we speak to be influenced by what we know.

And what we know is that when we have the chance to speak kindness, encouragement, truth, or love we need to do it, and do it then because in an hour, or a day, or a week the value may not even worth the bother.