Time and attention are the most important things according to Diantha Hopkins in her BYU-Idaho devotional talk on Tuesday.
Hopkins is a faculty member in the English Department at BYU-Idaho. She served a mission in Seoul, South Korea and lived for a time in Damascus, Syria. In her devotional address, she shared how relationships take time but are well worth it. She taught the principle of the “Ten-Minute Miracle” where spending 10 uninterrupted minutes with a person can help the two people bond. She’s put the principle into practice with her students. She meets one-on-one with her English 150 students at the beginning of each semester.
"I've been amazed at how much those 10 minutes affect the rest of the semester,” she said in her devotional address. “Since I've began doing this, I found that English 150 students respond better to my teaching and my feedback on their papers.”
In an interview with BYU-Idaho Radio, she explained that time spent on relationship building makes a difference.
“I think time is interesting because it's one of the only resources that we have that is not something that we can reproduce,” Hopkins said. “We can't get it back. And we can't trade it in the way that we trade money or other commodities. We often talk about time as if it's a commodity. We say time is money. But in reality, time is, as Elder Uchtdorf says, time is love. The time and attention that we spend on something really shows what we value and at our core what matters most to us.”
Listen for more devotional talks.