Spiritual Guidance: Spotting Crevice Time, and using it to accomplish more

People often ask me how I can accomplish so much in the same time that everyone has. When I was serving as an LDS Bishop of Santa Ana in the 1970s, we had a unique congregation and taught Sunday school in seven languages! It was an extremely busy time, with the building of a new financial services organization in Newport Beach and helping to raise a large family. Speaking assignments took me all over the world, and there were major demands of several civic responsibilities.

I knew that I had the ability to use my time very efficiently. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered a name for it: “Crevice Time.”

I had read a wonderful book titled “Free at Last in Paradise” written by Dr. Ananda Guruge, one of the sweetest friends I have ever known. It is about his beloved home, Sri Lanka, and this story is related: A Christian Padre was called to work in Sri Lanka. He arrived with a suitcase packed to the brim with various items of clothing and toiletry. He unpacked it carefully, teaching his students the names of each item as it was removed. He then asked each student to repack the case. Nobody could get the things fully returned. Then the Padre repacked the case, showing his students his secret. For every crevice between folded clothing, he would find space. He then related the moral:

“We all have 24 hours in a day. Some fill in the unforgiving minute with more distance run than others do. How do they do it? They fit in bits and pieces of useful work in unutilized crevices — the time we waste by waiting for someone to come or something to happen.”

Some of you will remember when there was a major oil shortage in the U.S. You haven’t forgotten the hours wasted in line at the gas pumps for your turn. Most of us were angry and frustrated at the “waste of time.” But, I was able to read the entire New Testament — not just scan it! Let me suggest that you take an inexpensive edition of your scriptures and do something that some will feel is somehow sacrilegious: Each morning, tear out several pages for reading during the bits and pieces of time that are available every day. What is Heavenly Father concerned about, the preserving of an unread copy of the Scriptures, or the damaging of a copy that is read and nurtured?

If we more efficiently use our Crevice Time, we can spend more time with our families and even have more “down time,” which all of us need. I pray that we may be more effective, which can help to alleviate the guilt that many of us feel about all of the things we “should have done,” but couldn’t get around to accomplishing. The Lord wants us to gain the peace He has promised us. Perhaps we can help Him in achieving this goal for us.

TOM THORKELSON is the director of Interfaith Relations for Orange County at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.