-Time. Life measured out to us in vapors, ever-so-brief moments, minutes, days and years and lifetimes. The times of my life, so much sand through the hourglass, each grain a precious gift fraught with indescribable potential, yet entirely irretreivable once it flows through the narrow neck of right now. Time does indeed march on, keeps on ticking, relentless, unstoppable, like the waves of the ocean. I cannot push the pause button, much less rewind. There it goes. There goes another one. And another. And another. What am I doing with the time which has been entrusted to me, these precious moments?
-Yes, each of these gifts can be a moment, a time of blessing, a time of opening up a serious can of glory, of showing off the breathtaking goodness of almighty God, a time of the wonderful impossible, where God can show up and break into this world to do His thing. What if that moment, that minute or season which just passed, had indeed been a time of blessing? What if something of the divine had shown up, if I had been a part of opening up a portal to heaven, a metaphysical wormhole of sorts, and heaven actually came right through it? What if in that moment the King of Kings had made an appearance on planet earth and done something divine through me? What if instead of spending that moment (and every moment) on self and on sin, instead of frittering it away on so much chaff, what if I had stewarded it into a blessing? We claim that ‘Christ lives in me’, do we not? God loves and longs to work through His people.
-But let us be perfectly clear on this point - this time we have been given, it is not ours. The translators of the NASB version insert the personal pronoun which is NOT there in the original Greek, and of course it is natural to make this assumption regardless - my time, my life. But in this we err egregiously. Time is a gift. A divine, beautiful season of opportunity, this. In fact the Greeks have a special word for it, more than just clock time - it is God-given time. And even once given, I am not the owner - just the manager. One day, at the end of days, when ‘my time’ is up I will be called to give an account of how I spent ‘my time’, which again was never mine to begin with. I am merely the manager. I’ve been entrusted with a handful of days (along with a fistful of talents), full of so much potential, and I have the opportunity to maximize them for the Kingdom of God, to show off the breathtaking goodness of almighty God as much as possible and help to populate the streets of Heaven. Which means it’s hunting season, people! You know how hunters love to hunt, and they are given just a short period of time each year in which they can hunt. Once the season opens, they are all in. No distractions, no diversions - they are going to give it their all, devoting every possible moment to this favorite of pastimes. But we're not talking about a pastime. For those who follow Christ, each and every day is hunting season, gifted full of moments to open up cans of God’s goodness on an unsuspecting world. So, how about this day? There’s no time to worry about yesterday. How will I make the most of this day to impact eternity?
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