One-twelfth of 2018 is nearly gone! Just eleven more precious months. Approximately …
- 345 darting days
- 8,016 hurried hours
- 480,960 molten minutes.
The numbers sound large … but they are not. In the impatient years of youth, my parents used to warn, “The years really fly by.” Because of the accompanying smiles and laughter, I thought they were joking. They were not!
In the twenty years of ministry at my former church I performed over 150 funerals and about as many weddings. You gain a certain perspective about the speed of life from being immersed in such events. At one wedding I was exclaiming about it making me feel old to perform a ceremony for a girl that I’d taught in Jr. High Bible study. Her mother turned with a comically perturbed expression and exclaimed, “Get over it! How do you think I feel?” She didn’t have to say another word. I could almost see the images flashing by behind her pupils … the natal unit, the first day of school, her daughter’s first crush, prom … all flying too quickly for belief.
Once I sat in bemused disbelief listening as family members of a deceased 90-year-old exclaimed, “We just didn’t see this coming.” In a way, I got it. I think that “irony of disbelief” was where my parents’ laughter came from. Our essence stands motionless a few feet from the tracks as years whistle by like an express train. We live in the balance between the feeling of eternal youth and relentless erosion. It is wise to be aware that life has a limited warrantee and that our expiration the date is in God’s hands.
All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Psalm 139:16
Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Psalm 90:12
