What Will You Do With the Time You Have Left?

That is the question I asked myself yesterday. Last June when I retired, I whispered this prayer. Lord, I don’t know how much time I have left, but if You would give me this first year of retirement, I will make the best of it. For some reason, I remembered that prayer yesterday. When I drove home on Saturday, I said to myself that my first, middle, and last name was FUN. I thought about the season I lived in that wasn’t fun and thanked God that He had brought me back to this place. I drove home from the same place last night and had a ton of cascading thoughts. Lord, help me not to take my life for granted. Yesterday, I got a chance to talk to some moms, and some of what we talked about was heavy. I just said my prayers and called moms and their children out by name. Can I tell you that I started crying? I know that there are many moms who are carrying an unbearable weight of worry. What breaks my heart is the number of moms who are still sacrificing their lives for adult children. Not because their children are physically sick, but because of the poor choices those adult children have made and somehow the mom feels responsible. It’s not my place to judge. But I want you to know that I am concerned. A few years ago, I listened to this podcast where a profound question was asked: if you were told that you had one week left to live, how would you spend it? The follow up was, if those things are important enough to do your last seven days, why aren’t you doing them now? I wish you peace, joy, and freedom. Oh yeah, that was yesterday’s prayer. That more people would come to the understanding that they are already free. So much more on this another day… I’ll close in my best teacher voice: Use your time wisely.