It’s always during the deep hours of the night (and, by the way, it just has to be while you’re comfortably laying on your bed propped up with three pillows and snuggled under two goose-down blankets) that you start to particularly be unimpressed with the temporary nature of our lives.
You groan and open your eyes–suddenly, you no longer feel so comfortable.
And for a moment, you look at your own 23 mostly miserable years of life and wonder: How did I get here so soon? I was 6 just yesterday.
For dust we are and to dust we shall return–how true those words ring. A timeless truth. An inescapable reality.
One day, you will grow old and die. Your once luscious locks of hair will loosen its grip on your scalp and fall away to the ground, reminding you that youth does inevitably ebb away. Your once raven dark hair will soon be coupled with blinding white, and your hair strands will contest each other, contrasting each other. You wish and pray fervently that the hair you’ve had so faithfully for decades will win this battle and administer resiliency…until finally, the dreadful white adversary proclaims victory instead. You’re crushed, but you’ve known this would happen anyway. The edge of your eyes show perpetual traces of laughter and grief, creases make its home around your mouth when you wryly smirk to yourself, and your precious collagen breaks down, forcing your face to start sagging. For the love of all that’s good, you don’t want to look droopy, but you don’t have a choice. Your bones become brittle, your energy is depleted, and your mind is not as expeditious as it used to be.
Finally, you’re 90 and ready to die. One day, for no reason in particular, you wobbly get yourself to stand up, ignoring the arthritic pain in all your joints. You walk to a full length mirror and stare at yourself in the reflection, you in all your decrepit glory. If you’re lucky and your mind is not too senile, you’ll think, “Why…am I already…so old?” Your once 23-year-old self is now just a vague memory of the past.
When you realize that this time is coming much sooner than you anticipate, you panic. You wonder–am I really going to see Jesus when I die? Is death as dark as my bedroom is right now? Had this all been one grandiose conspiracy just to console us for what’s to come? If I married someone I loved so deeply–could I accept the fact that it can’t be forever? That even in things like romance and marriage, there is no such thing as “forever?” That even if we held hands and died together, the only thing we could possibly still have is leave behind an intangible legacy? Or will I die alone? Does death hurt? These questions wrestle with your soul without reserve.
We’re so caught up by how much time we “still have,” whether it’s 40, 50, or 60 years down the road, that we forget one indispensable truth: time will never wait for you.
Although I don’t have any particular moral to leave behind, there is one thing I know for certain–we are foolish to think that time waits for us. We convince ourselves that we “still have time.” No. How untrue that all is. Time never waits. It never will. God makes sure of that. So if anything, I can offer one caveat to you–whatever it is you feel, whatever it is you do, whoever it is you invest your time and life in–make it count. You only have one very short life to live.
Posted on August 31, 2010
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