Just some early morning thoughts from me to you…
“Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, ‘If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.’” James 4: 13-15 (NLT)
Okay, here’s the deal—let’s say you have thirty days to live.
Now what will you do?
What will be important to you now?
How about the reemergence of the Coronavirus in certain new areas around our country? Important. Sure.
What about all the looting, destruction, violence and destruction of the historical statues around our nation. Important. Of course.
But remember—thirty days.
Whether we realize it yet or not, our time here on earth is limited. No matter how uneasy that might make you and me feel to think about, it’s an absolute fact.
No matter who you are, how young or how old, what measure of success—whether money, fame, or power by worldly standards you may have attained—mortality is the great leveler for us all.
So, you have thirty days. Maybe if we stretch it—forty-five? Or if the medical tests were wrong, it turns out you only have twenty.
What if today is your last day?
James reminds us we are not promised tomorrow. Yet we live life as if it will go on forever, and we miss the best, the most important moments which are there for us to enjoy, and are there for us to add value to, and build into for eternity.
In the last few days, two precious young friends have passed from here into the arms of their Heavenly Father. Gone too soon.
I hope they knew that they made a difference in the lives of so many others—in their shorter than usual time among us.
The song “For Good” from the Broadway musical “Wicked” says it well—
“I’ve heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason
Bringing something we must learn…
Like a comet pulled from orbit as it passes the sun,
Like a stream that meets a boulder halfway through the wood
Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better,
Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.
It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime,
So, let me say before we part so much of me
Is made of what I learned from you.
Like a ship blown from its mooring by a wind off the sea
Like a seed dropped by a sky bird in a distant wood.
Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better, but because I knew you,
Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”
I pray that you have been blessed as I have been by God having put others in my life who, because I knew them, I have been changed for good. Time and time again, person after person.
So maybe what is important for us to think about in whatever number of days you and I have remaining, is this—
Will others be able to say—“Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.”
Now, may I suggest we live our lives—with that perspective.
In His Name–Scott
