Life Is More Than One Moment.

Last night I received a phone call from someone I've not spoken to for nearly 30 years. The phone call sent my mind racing for hours and I hardly slept at all as I thought back, not only to 30 years ago, but over all that has transpired in those 30 years... both good and bad. I reflected on how good God has been to me and just how blessed I am and how that one decision made by someone else 30 years ago so drastically altered my life. At that time, I was devastated and thought life was over. I could not see it then, but that moment set me on the course for who I am today, and I'm so grateful. Sometimes what brings us such extreme pain is ultimately for our good, but we cannot see past the moment, nor the pain. Many people give up in such moments, rather than realize this is a moment in time, just a blip on the big screen of our lives. If we would only come to realize that while every day is important, it's just one day... just one week or month, or even year. Looking back at 55 years, one or two years does not seem to be all that much, but when I was 25 years old, 2 years seemed like an eternity. I pays to keep our eyes focused on the goal, and not make decisions or change directions based on the moment. 

All of these thoughts brought to remembrance a post I wrote several years ago, which I want to share again below. Be blessed everyone, and I pray you realize that life is so much more than what you feel today!

 

09 December, 2005

Time Sure Does Fly

This morning I was reading another sight where someone was talking about gluttony, and a friend, speaking about getting older and managing your weight, wrote these words: "It's like all of the sudden before you know it you have began to put weight on in places that you never had before."
Suddenly my mind was off and running. I started reflecting on things that have happened or that I had just thought about within the past 5 days.

This literally happened to me the other day. I was in the bathroom gathering laundry, and as I stood up, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I stopped and said, "And just who are you?" I dropped the laundry, looked at the puffy eyes, the sagging jaw line, the receding hairline, graying hair and beard (not to mention the paunch around my mid-section and sags and droops where there used to be a lean tight body, and I thought, "Wow, where did the years go?"

I was driving down the road yesterday and I heard someone talking about the 25th anniversary of John Lennon being shot and killed. Again, I'm like, "Oh wow! Twenty-five years? How can that be?" Seems like such a short time ago. I mean I can remember every detail of that night, walking into my cousins front door and they were watching Monday Night Football and the news broke in about the shooting.
Time sure does fly, and it is SO cruel to the body!
I came home yesterday and started looking at some picture albums and I laughed at how skinny I was, yet somehow longed for the days when I could literally eat an entire pizza and still only weigh 138 pounds. Now, 3 slices adds to this 227 pounds I lug around. Ugghh! 
As I continued to take my trip down memory lane... laughing at the hair and clothes we wore... still all the while thinking where did the time go?
Time sure does fly.

It reminds me of a verse of Scripture found in Job 7: 6 that says, "My day's are swifter than a weaver's shuttle..."

For those who do not know what a “weaver’s shuttle” is: If you have ever seen someone working at a weaving loom, the little thing that runs back and forth across the loom, weaving a thread in and out of the other threads, that is a weavers shuttle. If you have seen this, you will agree it is amazing to watch as this things runs back and forth, over and over leaving the thread behind as it goes, and thus forming the fabric or tapestry that is the makers design.

Ahhh! Can you see what Job is saying?

Our life is flying by, all the while leaving a thread of us as we go. Many times to us it does not make a lot of sense… but to “the maker” it does!

He has a plan, a design for your life and mine, and in his mind, he sees the finished product. We have to trust the maker!

If you notice, a weaver seldom uses just one color. To put other colors into the fabric, there must be times when the process is slowed down or stopped, and one thread is cut and a new thread of a different color is inserted, and the process begins again. This process must be repeated over and over to make a beautiful tapestry. Sometimes threads that have already been woven in must be ripped back out.

Do you see the parallel in our lives?

We so often get so frustrated when there are changes, or stalling/stopping stages in our life… but there is a reason. To get the finished product that the maker has planned out, there has got to be a change of material. There is pain in those places, as one thread is cut and tied off and an new one entered in. But we must learn to trust the master designer.

Yeah, I look in the mirror and I see changes. I realize that I am not what I was… but I am getting closer to what God wants me to be.
Do I mean that God’s plan is to make me a pudgy, balding, saggy jawed man? No, that’s not it at all.

Because what God is working on is on the inside of me.
It is in the threads I leave behind.

You see, as the weaver’s shuttle runs back and forth leaving it’s thread, it is intermingling with other threads, and as it passes by each of the other threads, they become a part of something together, and with each time it passes across the loom, the garment becomes tighter and tighter and all those individual threads becomes one work. That is what God is trying to do with us; to mesh our lives together to make us, the Body of Christ, into something beautiful and useful.