Time Flies

A couple of days ago I woke up at about 2:30 in the morning. I glanced at the wall clock and was perplexed to see the hands moving quickly around the face of it. At first, I thought I must be dreaming, so I got up and took a closer look. Yep, time was flying, for sure! I felt like I was in an old black and white movie that used “special effects” to show the passage of time. My clock is an analog atomic clock and stays on time by some magic formula (okay, it’s a quartz oscillator that transforms a frequency that is applied to a collection of atoms, but it might as well be magic)! My fancy clock finally stopped its frantic movement when it hit 8:30. Hmmm, only six hours off, but I was too tired to care. I went back to bed and slept a few more hours. By then, the clock had corrected itself and was displaying the correct time. Who knows what these clocks do in the middle of the night!

This was a clear object lesson about how quickly time passes and the fragility of life. A verse in the Psalms sums it up very well:

Teach us to realize the brevity of life,
so that we may grow in wisdom. – Psalm 90:12 (NLT)

Moses, the writer of Psalm 90, provides a simple prayer. He asks God for wisdom to account for his time. In a week that saw the death of a childhood buddy, and stays in the hospital for family and friends, it is clear that time flies and life is fragile. It is important to treasure the precious time God has given me and live it with God-given wisdom and grace. I don’t know what the future holds, so it’s critical to dedicate each day to the Lord. I must decide daily to live out my faith with the hope I find in Jesus, the Messiah.

It’s true – time flies.