TRANSFORMING YOUR WORLD

Time. What an incredibly interesting phenomenon. Your senses can't discern it. You can't hear, smell, taste, see or touch it. It has no life, no spirit and yet governs all that we do in one way or the other. We see its affect in the aging process. We divide it up into categories. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, generations, etc. In fact an Olympic athlete may win the hundred yard dash by 1/100th of a second. Some nations of the world may use a different measure for time as in counting years. For some it is 2008 but for others it is 5000-something. We use three broad categories in which we make reference to time, the past, present and future. The past can never be reclaimed or relived, the present is the exact moment and the future is only an non-experienced possibility not yet made manifest. The only past we really know is our own personal past we have experienced. All other past events are taught us by someone else. The past will often influence our present and perhaps our future. But we cannot live in the past. We have the exact current moment and a hope for future possibilities. We cannot, with all our human knowledge and accomplishments, control the future. We can prepare for it, we can influence it and in some sense shape it, but we cannot control it. Time submits to no one except God who alone controls it. Time, which is temporal, must yield to God who is eternal. While we cannot control time, God through His wisdom and grace grants us the ability to not allow time to rule us. We can make it a useful tool and advocate, or we can make time our adversary. Since we cannot return to the past, we can take the lessons of the past and use them to strengthen us and makes us wiser as we move into the future. To not learn those lessons can cause our future to be no better, and perhaps worse than the past. To have that brighter future may mean that there are things in our past that we will need to let go of for good. These may be things, or even people or situations that have become dear to us or even security for us. But to get to where God wants us to achieve, and to get what God wants us to have, we sometimes have to "Let go and let God." Though time is fleeting, based primarily on the earth's daily rotation on its axis and annual revolution around the sun, it is clear, time waits for no one. The writer of Ecclesiastes declares that there is a time (season) for everything under the sun, including a time to be born, a time to live, a time to die. By God's grace, use your time wisely. We have but a few fleeting moments and then comes eternity. Learn from your past, take hold of your future as you live out God's plan and not time's plan for your life.