Happy 2012

Happy New Year! Hopefully the newness hasn't worn off quite yet. The end of 2011 proved challenging... experiencing heart-wrenching loss, empty seats around the holiday table, and a heavy heart for so many trying to find their way amidst sorrow, emptiness, loneliness and pain. 2011 taught me, is teaching me, the importance of our time... what we do with it, the understanding that no one knows how much they have, and the dire need to tell a world about the hope that is found only in Jesus Christ.

I spent a lot of last year focused on time anyways, because it just seemed to be flying by so quickly and the harder I hung on, the faster it went. Trying to figure out how to slow it down, how to make the most of it, how to measure it. We like to measure things, don't we? Down south, we're all too familiar with measuring. A few of our favorites (or at least mine)...tea by the gallon, sugar by the pound, butter by the stick, coffee by the cup, fabric by the yard, tomatoes by the bushel, apples by the peck, and on and on and on. We have measuring cups in our kitchen, a tape measure in our garage, scales in our bathroom, a yard stick in our craft room... the ability to measure something tangible, what an awesome concept. But time...how do we measure time?

We have hour glasses, sundials, the clock, calenders, chronometers, and so forth. Is that how we measure our time? Or how about seconds and minutes and hours and days? There are 86, 400 seconds in a day, that's 1,440 minutes, or 24 hours. And there are 365 days in a year... that is 12 months, 8,766 hours, 525, 949 minutes, 31,556,926 seconds. Does that work? Oh, or what about the breaths we take? I was reading in Our State magazine this past week and it had an article that started off with a few facts about breathing. It stated, "We take 15 breaths every minutes, 900 breaths every hour, 21,600 breaths every day." Makes me think of the quote "Is it the amount of breathes we take or the moments that take our breathe away?" Well, is it?

None of these seem to help measure time in an eternal sense. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "...He has also set eternity in the hearts of men." When God created us, He purposed us to live forever, and then came Adam and Eve and that serpent in the garden... sin, that thing that robbed us of a direct line of communication to God. That thing that created death and eternal separation from a Holy God. But eternity was still in our hearts... that's why it is so hard to lose someone we love, because we feel in our spirit that we should live forever. And that is what makes Jesus Christ and His sacrifice so glorious. As He hung on that cross, and breathed His last, He conquered death. The veil was torn and that direct line was brought back, He made a way for that yearning of eternity in our hearts to become a real thing, Jesus bought back our time. Oh, and how we praise Him for that!

So, if Jesus sacrificed Himself to give us the hope of eternity, how should that change the way we use our time? It only seems right that we use it to glorify His name because He is the only One worthy. Worthy to live for and worthy to die for.

Just something to think on as we begin a new year. How will you spend your 31,556,926 seconds?