Don KirklandOne of my favorite songs by the Canadian artist, Anne Murray, has a haunting quality to it, continuing to play sadly on the mind even when it has ended. It recalls the deep longing of the heart to restore a lost romance, to “chart a course that gets me back to you, back to where we used to be.” Throughout the song is the poignant refrain, “Time, don’t run out on me.”
The lyrics of the song express both a hope and a plea, and while they are used by Murray in the secular context of lost love that may be regained, they also can speak more generally of the despair often felt by people who are faced with the fact that time is running out on them. There comes to us more often than is comfortable the realization that whatever we are to accomplish in life – perhaps the “one more thing I gotta do before I pack it in,” according to the song – must be done sooner rather than later.
Many days, we are confident that time is still on our side. Other days, we are convinced that time is working against us. Either way, we still have in our possession the precious commodity of time, which God expects us to use in ways that honor him and that benefit others.
We should never, though, become so preoccupied with the question of how long we might live, for which we do not have an answer, that we pay little if any attention to the more important question of how well we shall live, for which we do have an answer.
At his inauguration in Nashville on Feb. 6 as the ninth president of LifeWay Christian Resources, Thom Rainer addressed the issue of the relative shortness of our lives by telling his audience, “We are given but a precious few years in this adventure called life,” and then asking, “Will we live that life with boldness, trusting a God who is sovereign and omnipotent?”
Boldness in what Rainer called “the brevity of life” has a bearing on how well we live as Christians in a world that can be frightening and intimidating even to the most faithful.
The famous British writer, Samuel Johnson, once spoke of the “mortifying reflection” of having to measure what we have done in life compared to what we might have done.
Is it any less “mortifying” to reflect on what we are as opposed to what we could be and what we should be?
Still, time is on our side. “It is never too late,” wrote another British author, George Eliot, “to be who you might have been.” How we finish in life is of utmost importance. Someone has said, “Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.”
Believers should live in the hope of finishing well in life. It requires that we capture, and are captured by, a vision of God and his glory, and of his will for our lives. But spiritual insight and foresight alone are not enough, however. As a Japanese proverb puts it, “Vision without action is a daydream, and action without vision is a nightmare.”
The late evangelist, Vance Havner, hit the nail squarely on the head when he said, “The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.”
The life of the believer is characterized by movement, and there is no better example of that truth than Abraham, who, at the command of God, left the known for the unknown, which is enough to unsettle even the heartiest soul.
By its very nature, the Christian life is never static, continually marked by movement either forward or backward, either gaining ground or losing ground in what should be the passionate pursuit of Jesus – becoming more like one who was in perfect tune with God and who, while on this earth, “went about doing good.”
We are called as disciples to think like Jesus, act like Jesus and to relate to God as our Father, too. It is the assignment of a lifetime, but we will not get it done. Still, we must begin, and if we have begun, then continue, moving as close to the mark as possible. Time will run out on us, and we have less of it than we did a moment ago.