Annie Dillard has made the observation that “How we live our days is ... how we live our lives.” My life is an accumulation of its days, and so is yours. The legacy of my life is the sum of what I have done with the days which God has given me, and so is yours. It cannot be any other way.
To think that our lives would be anything else than what we do on a daily basis would be like we were building a log cabin on a piece of ground. Every day we would add a log or two, piece by piece, joint by joint. Then, one day we would wake up and go out to our building site fully expecting to find a two story brick house! Impossible!
But some people just live in this fantasy world believing that the outcome of their life is going to be different from what they are putting into it. They seem oblivious to the principle of cause and effect somehow expecting things to be different tomorrow without having done anything different today to bring about a better outcome. Certainly, God works and blesses us, but He particularly blesses those who are trying to serve Him and follow His will.
Years ago, I remember having conversations with a brother who was one of the leaders of a small congregation. He would lament the fact that the church was facing difficulties but kept returning to this theme: “We just need to catch a break.” Really? It seems to me that churches and individual Christians make their own “breaks” through prayer, hard work, and the subsequent blessing of our heavenly Father. (This is not to say that God doesn’t sometimes send a blessing upon us “out of the blue.”)
So, what does your life look like right now? Is it going in a direction which is pleasing to your Lord Jesus? Good! God bless you! But perhaps it’s going in the wrong direction or just stagnant? What should it look like? What do you need to jettison from your life, and what do you need to start doing? Whatever it is you need to do, you can’t do it tomorrow. You must do it today! Our lives are the sum total of what we do today.
“So, teach us to number our days.”
><> Jeff
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