It always, I mean always amazes me at how fast time flies by, there is just not stopping it! It seems like just yesterday I was 11 and we were moving to MS. Or just the other day I was graduating from college, or watching my brother grin from ear to ear as his wife walked down the isle, or held my lil nephew and loved on Raney for the first time, or lived and served in the Philippines...
Where does time go? The more important question I have been thinking and feeling guilty about lately is what am I doing with my time?
As I look at the year that has just passed, I am overwhelmed with how distracted I have been and can be. It doesn't take much to get my mind off focus, and my heart on a completely different track, of "my" path. There are always places to go, things to do, stuff to buy, people to see, ministry to be involved in, love to be given, work to be done, plans to be made, all of which just engulfs huge amounts of time.
And what is the first thing on my schedule that goes out the window when time and busyness invade and take over my days... the LORD and being still before Him.
This past Sunday my pastor, an amazing proclaimer of the Gospel, spoke of how suffocated we are with the things, intentions, purposes, glories, plans, joys, cares, and loves of this world. We are in this world, and the Lord himself asked that we not be taken out of it. He compared our spiritual vitality to our lungs, and daily we breathe in the air/pollution of this world, the sin, rebellion, and just worldliness... and we can't help but breathe it in. There is no escape from it, there is nowhere that we can go to stop breathing in the air of this fallen world. And eventually it has an effect on our lungs. It cripples our lungs, it stunts our growth, and effects our life breath.
The only way to breathe the cleaner air that is from above is to lift my face up, turn my eyes to the things above, and seek His face, breathe in His grace. Oh, if only that were as easy as it sounds. It takes all the energy I have to fight against myself and my will, not even considering the world around me, and time that seems to pass in the blink of an eye. I feel like a fish swimming upstream, fighting against the current. I am different and should look that way. But a lot of times I find myself caught up in the same life, the same time warp, and temporal world that everyone else is caught up in, and I wonder where I went wrong, when did my eyes gaze fall downward, when did the fog set in and I wander off His path.
It's a difficult battle daily to fight against the flow, and to walk the difference of the Gospel. It's a battle that can't be done on my own strength. Yes, the LORD is teaching me this again!! How thick headed can I be?! I often wonder in my mind, when I get to the end of my life, will I look back and be proud of what I have spent my time doing, or will I look back and regret how I wasted my life on pointless worldly things that don't hold an ounce of weight in eternity. At the end of my life will I have exercised and used my spiritual lungs and therefore be prepared to breathe in the holy air of heaven and the presence of the Lord himself; or will my lungs be so crippled and atrophied, from spending all my time breathing the world's pollution, that I can't survive on the pureness of the Lord?
Oh Lord, help me now not to waste my life on pointless time wasting things. Focus my time, eyes, heart and life on You and You alone!!!
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