The grandparents pulled all the liquor from underneath the counter early in the morning on the day everyone was to arrive for the holiday gathering. Next, they searched the internet for the most popular drinks. Their last step was to see which drinks they could make with the liquor they had. Their oldest son and his family were the first to arrive to help and asked about the liquor on the counter and were told they had created a list of possible drinks from the internet. Their daughter-in-law glanced at their list, took less than 10 minutes to type into Artificial Intelligence (AI) all the bottles they had, and a different list quickly appeared. An hour later, their son arrived, having come straight from college and asked the same question, why was all the liquor on the counter. After hearing why, he took a picture of all the bottles, uploaded the image into AI and immediately had a more expansive list. Each of them thought they were timely, using new knowledge for them to accomplish something. Whose skills were the timeliest?

The challenge with being timely is something will change and soon you’ll be out of date.  The cuffs and pleats that were in style on the dress pants I wore a decade ago are not in style today. I wouldn’t be “caught dead in them” today. We’re timely when we adapt to changing times and we need to keep adapting. For me, I need to learn how to understand and use AI or I’ll fall behind. We need to be like AI, constantly learning and growing. Unfortunately, the older we get the more we resist making changes and cling to what we know because we hate the feeling that comes with change. In the blink of an eye, we go from knowing something and feeling confident in our abilities to being a novice again. Oh, how we hate the feeling of being a novice.

Timeless is the flip of timely in that it stays the same throughout time. Yes, even today in 2025 and next year in 2026 and each year following, some things will remain timeless. In a day and age when it feels like everything is changing constantly, it should be comforting to know there are plenty of things that are timeless.

• Curiosity – We were born curious. Watch a baby or young child and they are incredibly curious. We need it to learn and grow. Curiosity is the root of critical thinking, that process of continuous questioning to ensure we have all the information needed to make decisions, or if something we are told makes sense. The old phrase “buyer beware” needs curiosity and critical thinking or we’ll pay a steep price.
• Empathy – We care about what’s happening to others, we hurt when they hurt. Empathy is a natural human emotion, always inside of us. You may question that at times because there are some people who seem to care more about themselves than others, but most of us are very caring. If someone on your team has a problem, others will jump in to help. Watch the news and you’ll see with every disaster, people give of themselves to help and care for those impacted. That’s empathy in action.
• Communication – Since God mixed up the language people spoke (Genesis 11), communicating has been more of a challenge. We must be able to communicate to survive. We seek to understand and be understood. I recall several years ago my wife and I were in the Paris subway system late in the evening, trying to get to the Eiffel Tower. We were confused and the only two staff people we could find spoke only French and we spoke only English. Yet together we figured out the correct route. The ability to communicate thoughts and ideas with others will always set you apart.
• Teamwork – People have always banded together in teams for survival and success. They knew when they worked together, they could accomplish more than someone could on their own. Everyone wants to celebrate personal accomplishments, we have that feeling of “I did it myself”. The problem is you didn’t. There has always been a team of others involved in your accomplishments.

If you spend a few minutes, I’ll be you can come up with more things that are timeless that I didn’t cover.

It’s important to stay timely, but don’t do that at the expense of things that are timeless.

The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Genesis 11:6