Blink

Taking your first breath. Blink. Taking your last breath.

Wake up in the morning. Blink. Lay down to sleep at night.

Preparing for a trip. Blink. Coming back from the trip.

A baby is born. Blink. Now a college graduate walking across the stage.

Feeling appreciated. Blink. Feeling rejected.

Cold outside. Blink. Hot outside.

New Years Eve. Blink. Christmas morning.

Here today. Blink. Gone tomorrow.

Time is recorded by each blink we take.

A small word holding significant power and control in our lives. Blinks are there for all the laughs, tears, smiles, frowns, amusements, longings, etc. Blinks are like the ticks of the clock reminding us we can’t get any of them back. You can only move forward. This leaves us to ponder in each new season ‘perhaps the Lord has me here “for such a time as this”’ (Esther 4:14).

Time is a thief. What are you doing with the gift of time you have been given? Are you stewarding it well? What are you investing it in? Are you investing into something/someone who will continue to have an impact in God’s kingdom on earth after you pass? No one can steal time from you but yourself.

“I’ll do it later.” Later means when the conditions are perfect, I feel good, I have the money, I have the time, when I want to. It’s a pleasantry word we throw around in God’s face as we ask Him kindly to wait on us to get things in order and do what we want before He calls us to “actually do something”. We I make excuse after excuse of why I can’t, why I shouldn’t, why this is better, why it’s not logical/practical, why my plan is best, and on and on. All this time spent arguing with God ends up only delaying me from the good God is wanting to give me. He wants to let me enter into the Promise Land, but I’m too busy complaining about food and focusing on giants (thank you Israelites for your example of what not to do and yet sadly I keep finding myself doing).

Mistakes from our past have a way of anchoring us down to believe we can never move on. But if you’re breathing today you have been given a second chance. Don’t resign, keep going forward. Let God turn your messes into successes. Get over it! Move on. I still question if the pursuit of starting my own organizing business was just my own selfish desire. Was my heart in complete pursuit of the Lord in my endeavor to start my business? Were my motives truly to glorify the Lord with the business? I’m still wrestling with a lot of these questions. It doesn’t make sense to me why God would lead down that path only to pull me out so quickly and back into missions with AIM.  If it truly was obedience to the Lord in that season, what was the purpose of it? I may never know but I am curious. Now I’m not calling this a mess or failure but it’s the most recent personal example in my life of when God took what was good and gave me something better. As my pastor said this past Sunday, “God puts in our hands gifts we could never catch for ourselves.”

Blinking is a natural action of our bodies. We do it without thinking. We are as powerless to stop blinking as we are to stop the seconds on the clock from ticking away. Only you can decide what to do with them. The blinks. The seconds. Choose wisely. For either in a blink you will be reflecting on all the seconds you wish you would have ____________ (you fill in the blank), or in a blink you will be saying “Thank you God for the seconds I lived that are now being multiplied as the lives of those I influenced continue to tick through time with each blink of their eyes as I blink my last and enter into eternity where the seconds have no end.

Blink.

2 Peter 3:8-9 “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the LORD one day is a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The LORD is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”