Winter Lesson
When I was a boy, we never could afford to go to an artificial ice rink to play hockey or to skate. We always had to wait for nature to provide one in our neighbors’ open grassland. (It was the right field of our summer ballpark!) The storm drain would have to plug up with sticks and debris, and the snowmelt water would overflow the ditch and make a shallow pond, which would freeze, but only if the weather got frosty. The frozen pond would form by January or February, but not every year.
I came to appreciate winter as a short, passing season, really. Although the arctic weather could be rough, I knew that it was a passing phenomenon; it wouldn’t last forever. My skating and tobogganing seasons were short-lived, at best. As rough as winter could be, it was delicate, really, and all of the winter fun could be ruined with the advance of a warm front.
Winter has helped me to understand something about the present tense. As rough as the present may be, it’s not forever, and I try to make the best of it. Like the advance of winter, I cannot always help preventing the approach of an event, but my reaction and response to it are my responsibility, and they reveal something about my character. Do I really trust that God will give me a better tomorrow? It is God’s will for us to be thankful. (See I Ths. 5:18.) Can I be thankful for the today that He has provided for me, in spite of it all?
Our tombstones will one day be engraved with two dates, one for our birth, and the other for our death. There will be a dash between those two dates. That dash is a physical representation of the time we will have spent on God’s Earth. It will represent all of our present-tenses that were lived out on a timeline that will tell the history of our past.
How we handled our present-tenses will live on in the memories of those who will have known us. God will surely know every detail.
Darla sent me an e-mail this past week called, “The Dash.” It ends:
So, when your eulogy is read, with your life’s actions to rehash,
Would you be proud of the things they say, about how you spent your dash?
How appropriate, that our life would be called a “dash!” Spend it well; it is speedy and short. God is the Final Judge, on how you spent your “dash.” Live it, in preparation for eternity! That “dash” will never end!
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