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Life Has an End
We may live many years, but the journey ends much too soon . . .
Desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.
Ecclesiastes 12.5
Few men leave life as they had wished or planned. For most of us there is something left undone, something we intended to do, or intended to say, but never did. Our hour came and found us unprepared. We found ourselves at the end of life, discovering that we had never lived. We intended it to be otherwise, but it was not.
For a life never to be lived is one of the greatest tragedies of all. All of us dream great dreams, all of us plan great plans, but for many of us, we dreamed a dream deferred until we no longer had time to dream. We fettered away our life, and then, wondered how life could have passed so quickly before our own eyes.
Whatever we do, of course, cannot really alter our allotted time, cannot add even one day to the length of our life. We live like powerless pawns in a game we neither understand nor control. And yet, we may be like pawns in a predetermined game, but we are also pawns who are alive and who can seize the moment of life. The truth is that we hold our very destiny in our own hands.
Too many men fret that they can do nothing in life. Every good door that comes to them, they close shut. Every blessing God bestows on them, they find fault. They are content to be miserable, and close their ears to what they do not wish to hear. They live their life in past memories of what should have been but never was. Or, they live for tomorrow which never comes. They never live for today and it is that today which God has granted to us.
Life is a gift from God, a precious gift. May we never squander what God has granted us. May we live this day by speaking good words to our wife, by spending time with an aged parent, or by pausing to take in the beauty of the world around us— the image of a setting sun, the smoothness of a refreshing breeze, and the color of a rose in its radiance.
The man answered and said unto them, Why herein is a marvelous thing, that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes.
John 9.30
Oh, God, open my eyes that may I see the world Thou hast made. May I live the life Thou has granted me. May I never complain of my lot in life. Give my spirit strength that I may rise above adversity. Grant that I may live, truly live. — Amen.
