God uses many means to tell you how to spend your time. You’ll find key principles in the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the teachings of the Church, and the examples of the saints. But the most instructive example—the one we should all be pondering every day—is the earthly life of Jesus.

Real Success. “When the time had fully come” (Galatians 4:4), God himself entered time and submitted himself to its laws. The Timeless and Eternal One had to learn to manage his time, just like us. What did he do?

Until the beginning of his ministry, he lived what we would call an ordinary life. He let hour after hour pass without accomplishing anything that was recorded for posterity. He didn’t spend his time in ways that gained him a lot of material comforts or worldly fame. In fact, when he died on a cross, some people concluded that he had accomplished nothing and that his life was a failure.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jesus’ life is the greatest success story of all time, because he perfectly fulfilled the mission for which the Father sent him into the world. Always and everywhere, his top priority was to do his Father’s will. As we think about our schedules and goals and game plans for the new year, this must be our top priority, too.

Using time wisely isn’t only a matter of good sense and prudence. It’s not just about getting things done. It’s about following the model of Jesus Christ, who ordered and made holy his time and all time. It’s about putting our trust in the Master of time, even when our best attempts to use time wisely don’t result in obvious achievement and success.

No Guarantees. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you shouldn’t work hard at putting some order into your life! As a time management coach, I’m interested in effective ways to accomplish goals and reduce stress. I recommend tips and techniques that aim to help people accomplish their tasks sooner and better, have more time with friends and family, and pray and meditate more.

Strategies like that should work for you, too. But I can’t guarantee it.

For even after you’ve mastered time management techniques and have learned how to order your life in accordance with them, it may be God’s gracious will that you get no closer to achieving the goals you’ve set. God may turn your life upside down, taking you down paths you never envisioned and selecting you for a mission you would never have chosen. He may test you in the fire of failure, teaching you to rely on his providence instead of your own devices.

He may choose, for reasons you can’t grasp, to let you dwell in frustration. That happened to the great nineteenth--century convert from Anglicanism, John Henry Newman, who labored for years to establish a Catholic university in Ireland and to create a new translation of the Bible. He was one of the best, brightest, most disciplined men of his era—even a model of time management. And he was holy. Nonetheless, God permitted Cardinal Newman’s two great projects to fail utterly.

God Is Sovereign. Here lies the ultimate lesson for all of us who hope to get control of our time, even those of us who seek to control our time so that we can serve God better: God is the master of time, not us.

We are only stewards of the time he gives us, and as stewards, we must always act to do the will of our Master and not our own. If he chooses to frustrate our legiti-mate efforts at time management, we must bear it patiently as a means to our sanctification.

By all means, explore time management techniques and adopt the ones that are right for you. Keep a planner, make schedules and to-do lists, stay on track, and seek to control your time so that you may make better use of it.

But preface all of your time management efforts with the silent prayer, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Let that prayer be your way of acknowledging God’s sovereignty over time, and particularly his sovereignty over your time. Then you will not fall into the error of trying to control time for your purposes and not his.

Do this and you will master the most essential element in time management for Catholics. You will imitate the example of Jesus. You will learn how to serve him “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind” ?(Matthew 22:37). And with all your time. 

Dave Durand, a husband and father of five, is the author of Time Management for Catholics (Sophia Institute Press: 1-800-888-9344; www.sophiainstitute.com).