[This is one in a series of mid-week Reflections published by Horley Baptist Church during August 2020]
Are you looking forward to commuting again? Or, if you already are, how do you feel about several million other people joining you? Personally, I’m glad to be out of the rat-race; I look back with no nostalgia at all to those two hours every day spent going and coming, repeating the journey I did yesterday and will do again tomorrow.
A hit song from the sixties, penned by John Reynolds, no doubt strikes a chord with most of us:
So much to do, if I only had time, if I only had time.
Dreams to pursue, if I only had time they’d be mine.
Time like the wind goes a-hurrying by and the hours just fly.
Where to begin? There are mountains I’d climb, if I’d time.
For us, time is a finite resource. God can increase or reduce the speed at which it passes – think of Joshua’s victory over the Amorites or Hezekiah’s experience with the shadow on the palace steps. Otherwise, we all have the same number of hours in a day and it is largely up to us how we use them.
The writer of Ecclesiastes declared “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” and added “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil – this is the gift of God.”
The first epistle of John warns about procrastination and complacency:
The world and its desires pass away,
but whoever does the will of God lives for ever.
CT Studd expressed the same thought: “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last”. Isaac Watts reminds us “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”
I trust that reading this reflection was time well-spent. Now, if you want to leave something to be remembered by, go and do something of eternal value with the rest of the day.
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Steve Humphreys
Contributed by Steve Humphreys; © the Author
