## Jack McCall: It’s Time to Evaluate Our Lives## Jack McCall: It’s Time to Evaluate Our Lives Time is a precious gift that passes by quickly. It’s important to make the most of the time we have left. As we get older, we realize that time seems to go by faster. Days feel like weeks, months feel like years, and years feel like months. This is because we become more aware of the value of time and realize that we don’t have much time left. The question then becomes what will we do with the time we have left? How will we spend the rest of our days? We can squander our time or we can use it wisely. We can choose to do things that are meaningful and fulfilling, or we can choose to do things that are just a waste of time. The choice is ours. We only have a certain amount of time on this earth. Let’s make the most of it.
It seems like just yesterday that a nurse in the hospital delivery room turned and handed our firstborn son to me, saying, “We’re going to have Dad take him to the nurses’ station and weigh him.”
Last May we celebrated his 44th birthday.
This summer my graduating class of ’69 will celebrate its 55th reunion.
Last week there was a job on the farm that required some heavy lifting. Needless to say, the heat of this summer made the job even more challenging. By the end of the day I was huffing and puffing…and in pain.
It took me a day or two to get over the heat and exertion. And I needed some Ibuprofen. Sometimes I am reminded that I am like the old gray mare – “She ain’t what she used to be.”
Someone once said, “Time passes, time waits for no one, and time will tell.“I notice that time leaves its mark.
It’s hard to believe that the year 2024 is already more than halfway over. As I get older, weeks feel more like days, months feel more like weeks, and years feel as short as months. I try to slow down and time just keeps speeding up. (Or at least it seems that way.)
Years ago my dear friend and saint Sam A. Denton discussed the concept of time with me.
“You think time goes fast now,” he said. “Just wait until you’re my age. It to fly Through.”
He was probably in his late 50s at the time. I saw the truth in his words.
My mother, who died at the age of 89, always said, looking back on her life, “It’s like a dream.”
Moses wrote in Psalm 90, “We spend our years as a tale that is told.” He describes the passage of time as “a sleep,” “like grass that flourishes and springs up and is mown at evening,” and “like a watch in the night.”
He continues: ‘Teach us then to number our days, that we may make our hearts wise.’
Our days are counting… I think time seems to go faster because we become more aware of its value as we get older and realize that we don’t have much time left.
And so the question becomes what will we do with the time we have left? Paul, the apostle, called it “redeeming the time.” What will we trade or barter for our remaining time? How will we spend the rest of our days?
On the subject of time, Arnold Bennett wrote: “Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With time, everything is possible; without time, nothing is possible. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, a thing that is truly astonishing when you examine it. You wake up in the morning and lo! Your wallet is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unfabricated fabric of the universe of your life! It is yours.
It is the most valuable possession. … No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives more or less than you receive.
Squander your infinitely precious good as much as you like, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw upon the future. Impossible to run into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. I said the affair is a miracle. Is it not so?
“Who among us has not said to himself — who among us has not said to himself his whole life, ‘I will change that when I have more time?’”
We will never have time again. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.”
And that raises the question: what should we do with it?
Rudyard Kipling challenged us to “fill the unforgivable minute with a sixty-second run” when he addressed the subject of adulthood in his classic poem “If.”
That’s it! To make the most of our allotted time.
The words of an ancient hymn remind us again of a pressing reality: “Years of time pass quickly, bringing nearer the goal of heaven…”
Jack McCall is a motivational humorist, southern storyteller, and author. He is a native Middle Tennessean and is nationally recognized as a Certified Speaking Professional. He can be reached at [email protected] Copyright 2024 by Jack McCall.
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