Life is ...

My daughter is soon going to turn 4, I’m going to turn 41, and my second child is due to be born (in exactly four weeks). All these events within the span of twelve days. And something hit me really, really hard. Life goes by awful fast. Not to mention, we’re going to spend an awful lot of money at the bakery every September.

I never understood the fact that the older you get, the faster life goes by, until I read this analogy. Think of a four-year-old child. She’s waiting for Christmas, and it seems like it will never, ever come. For her, she’s only experienced, say, four Christmases, though in reality she probably remembers just the last two. Two Christmases in her whole life! Thinking proportionally, for someone like me, that’s like a Christmas every two decades! No wonder children can’t understand patience the way an adult does. Or, perhaps, we don’t understand it the way they do.

So, life goes by too fast. Tell me something new. Okay. How ’bout this?

Because it speeds by so quickly, life is short. The older I get, certainly, the more this shortness seems to weigh heavily on my shoulders. Why?

Here’s why.

Life is too short to not live.
Life is too short to do a job you hate.
Life is too short to worry about paying the bills on time.
Life is too short to hide from the world.
Life is too short to hide from your family.
Life is too short to waste in front of a television.
Life is too short to tolerate anything that doesn’t fulfill, give joy, excite, interest.

Period.

Who’s going to care that you worked sixty hours a week at XYZ company for twenty years? Who’s going to care that you always paid the MasterCard bill a week before its due, juggling finances to do so? Who?

Life is about relationships – to God, to your friends, family, and acquaintances, and strangers, and to yourself. It’s about being creative, instead of reactive.

And there’s always less time than we think ...