Time is fascinating, isn’t it? Do you find that the older you get, the quicker time seems to go? My preferred explanation for this is the “proportional theory”.

For a five-year-old, one year is 20 percent of their whole life; but for a 50-year-old, it’s only 2 percent, which makes it feel small and quick by comparison.

Another strange thing about time is that it seems to go more quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves than when we’re bored.

Yet all these perceptions of time are illusions because – for all normal purposes, without getting into relativity etc – time is exact.

There are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week and so on. This means we all have the same amount of time at our disposal, and it’s largely our choice how we use it.

When people say they have no time to pray or go to church, what they actually mean is that they have chosen to do something else with their time: the average adult in Britain spends 7.5 hours a day looking at a screen of some type!

The question is, what is the best use of time? Even if we spend a lot of time doing God’s work, helping in the church, caring for people and so on, are we also choosing to set aside enough time to pray?

Mother Teresa and her nuns would set aside an hour for prayer every morning, half of which was spent in silent adoration of God: not asking for anything, just being with the Lord in obedience to His request to “Be still and know I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

She said they couldn’t have kept up their many hours of helping the poor without that prayer time.

This practice of contemplative prayer, just “smiling at God while He smiles at me”, as Mother Teresa put it, is sometimes known as “wasting time with God”.

It certainly can feel like wasting time because of our deep-seated human tendency to do everything in our own strength, rather than admitting we need God’s help.

But it’s not time wasted, because God repays the time we give Him with the grace to do His will the rest of the time.