I was shocked and saddened to learn of the passing of an evangelical minister by the name of Jerry Savelle on last week. It shocked me because I had just gotten tickets to attend a virtual conference that he was to be a part of next week. He had just preached on Sunday night to a congregation full of people only to pass away that Monday morning before he could get home. How could one who is expected to inspire and preach in a few days be gone before he got the chance? How could one be up and active; preaching the gospel one day and gone the next? It completely took me aback! To calm my uneasiness about it, I quickly reverted to the thoughts of his age and perhaps his health. But I had not heard of any recent health scares or concerns regarding him. And he was only 78 years old. To someone really young, 78 may seem so far away. But when I compared my age to his, I realized that 78 was not even a full 30 years away for me! Anyone over the age of 30 can easily look back now and see that 30 years will come and go like the snap of a finger.
Psalm 90:10 says the length of our days is seventy years or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. If we base our time on this scripture (hypothetically, of course), at the age of 35, you have hit the halfway mark! It typically means you have about 35 more summers left. Thirty-five more Christmas's and Thanksgivings left. I have saying that I use often. It says, "whatever you plan to do, you better go ahead and do it". Life is swiftly passing by and many of us are taking time for granted. If you think about it, it did not take you very long to reach the age of 35. The summers and winters came and went. You went to grade school and before you knew it, you were graduating high school and headed to college. College was only a few years. Shortly afterward, you had a family and was chauffeuring your own children to school. Many people my age have children with children. Day in and day out, we watch the sun rise and fall without doing any of the things on God's to-do list.
Those things that greet you in the morning and harass you at night that you know you are assigned to and purposed for never get done. You tell yourself that you will wake up early and take care of it. Morning comes and you hit the snooze instead. So, you tell yourself that you will find time to squeeze it in during the workday only to get to work and be engulfed by a bunch of demands that are someone else's urgencies. The day goes by, and you resolve to work on your God-given dreams and ideas when you get home from work only to discover that you're way more energy depleted than you anticipated. Therefore, you go to bed another night not having done the things that are most important to you.
So, the question of the week is: when will you do it. When will you break the cycle of waking up late and cramming your days with things that matter more to other people versus carving out the time to do something for yourself? The 90th Psalm, verse 12 says, "Teach us to number our days that we may know wisdom". I love what the CEV version of the Bible says: "Teach us to use wisely all the time we have."
This month, I want you to break the cycle. Waking up late and rushing through your day about to lose your mind responding to the urgent matters of other people while ignoring the things that bring you to life must be something you leave behind in the month of April. I am not suggesting that you neglect the duties on your job. However, I am suggesting that you don't put all of your energy into trying to impress your bosses and colleagues while failing to impress yourself. At the end of the year, those whom you worked so hard for won't even notice. But your mental and emotional health will notice that you neglected your own happiness chasing a high that you thought would come from someone outside yourself. Today must be the day that you go back and take a look at the God-given dreams that had you so enthusiastic at the beginning of the year. Add something from your goal list to your daily to-do list. What we are NOT going to do is go a whole year being a champion for everyone else and end up staring at 11:59 on New Year's Eve full of resentment and regret.
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