The Swift Traveling of Time…

Sometimes, some event in our lives brings sharply into focus the swift traveling of time. It may be a birthday or some other anniversary which ties some happening of the past to the present, and emphasizes the time between the two. And often we find ourselves assuming that it is a year or two or three since some remembered event, and then find in fact that it happened as far back as four or five or ten.

The frightening part of time’s passing is that there aren’t any unlimited portions of it left in this life⎯not in anyone’s life, so far as our years here are concerned.

From such thoughts could come a number of different conclusions and courses. One such that could come is a feeling of frustration, the feeling that it’s too late now to change, too late to do much differently. This feeling of defeat is false in its betrayal of the future.

Another possible course is to pursue a feverish pace to make up for the past, a pace that puts more emphasis on motion than on direction⎯the kind of nightmarish pace that makes a man exhaust himself in running without arriving.

The sensible and satisfying course lies between these two, between hopeless resignation and the feverish pace of panic. All of us have wasted time⎯and all of us are aware at times that we have too little of it left. All of us have made mistakes. All of us could no doubt use a more sure sense of values. But what’s past is past, and there is no point in wasting what is left of life in brooding the past.

The satisfying course from here is one of quiet sincere consistency, of being earnestly and “anxiously engaged in a good cause”⎯not in the panic that comes with an awareness of what is wasted or how little is left, but with the quiet repentant purpose that uses well whatever is left.

We did not come here in perfection. We came to learn and to use the principles of eternal progress that will lead us, with our loved ones, back to Him who made us in His image, and whose purpose is to bring “to pass our immortality and eternal life.” And time has not been altogether wasted if we learn of life’s everlasting purposes and possibilities, and from here on repentantly pursue them in honesty and honor.