carpe diem

Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be. Remind me that my days are numbered, and that my life is fleeing away.

– Psalm 39:4, NLT

 

Time: It is our greatest resource. We treat it as we do our money – we spend it, buy it, and borrow it – yet we cannot get more of it for all of our efforts. We have all been left wishing there were more hours in a day, more minutes on the clock, more moments spent with someone we love. How, then, are we to steward this most precious of commodities?

 

It begins with a prayer for perspective. David asks God to remind him just how fleeting life is. Why would he do such a thing? Most people avoid thoughts of death and the limitations of our time. Yet death and the realization of life’s brevity bring clarity. How many books, songs, and movies confirm this? Someone finds out they have only 6 months left to live and suddenly everything of significance comes into focus. All they previously deemed important is mere distraction and background noise. Such stories resonate with us because, deep within, we know they speak truth. The psalmist simply beat Hollywood to the punch on this plot by 3,000 years.

 

This is no morbid preoccupation with death; nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, David is asking God to help him live with purpose: “God, I want my life to count. I want to devote my days to things that really matter. Show me how much time I have so I don’t get caught up in short-term pursuits.” David recognized that it is foolishness to live as if we are immortal, expending everything on a life that is temporary and nothing on a life which lasts forever. Jim Elliot, a missionary who was killed at age 28 while carrying the Gospel to the native people of Ecuador, put it this way: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

 

The fact of the matter is that the greater our consciousness of our own mortality, the more attuned to eternity we become. We should not misconstrue this attitude for escapism; God does want us to forget about the mundane and unpleasant realities of life, or to abandon all thought of the here-and-now. Quite the opposite: He desires to impart meaning and context so we might live this life more fully. As Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10, NJK, emphasis mine). To borrow a phrase from The Message Bible, when we live our everyday, ordinary, sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life in the light of eternity, even the most routine endeavor takes on new meaning (Romans 12:1).

 

Consider Jesus. This is the man who possessed only 3 short years to complete the most monumental task in human history: reconciling God with a fallen creation. This is also a man who was poignantly aware of his mortality. Yet throughout the Gospels, we never see a picture of Jesus rushing around, worrying about keeping appointments or making people wait. He didn’t carry a Day-Timer or wear a watch. By all accounts he paid precious little attention to schedules or the time. Search for any form of the word “run” in the Gospels; you will never find it used to describe Jesus.

 

What you will find repeatedly is Jesus taking his time. He took time to hold and bless children, even after his disciples tried to run them off because he was “too busy.” He took time to commune and pray alone with his Father, despite the overwhelming pressures and endless needs of ministry. He took the time to walk everywhere instead of riding horseback, investing in the lives of his disciples through shared experience and quantity time – not just quality time. The portrait of Jesus shows a very deliberate and unhurried pace in spite of the incessant press of crowds and his looming death sentence. This is because Jesus had an eternal perspective; he wasn’t trapped in the moment. He knew his life had an end, but he also knew that it would continue on into eternity. So he considered each moment and the next and the one following, doing what was best in the long run.

 

We would be wise to take a lesson from this. Later in his prayer, David says, “We are merely moving shadows, and all our busy rushing ends in nothing” (verse 6). Do not miss the irony here: We rush around because we believe we have so many important things to do, yet rushing is the very thing which robs our lives of meaning. The reality of death imparts a sense of urgency to our lives, but the reality of eternity tempers that urgency by showing us what is truly important.

 

None of us are promised tomorrow; all we have is this moment. Today is the day that God has made for us. Let us rejoice in it, be glad in it, and seize it.