Instead of making new year’s resolutions this year, I decided to take things day by day. I know what needs to be done around the house, for my family, at the community college where I teach, the printing ministry that my wife and I have the enjoyment of operating, and my personal needs such as exercise, diet, personal devotion, Bible reading, prayer time, and practicing. It actually requires me to prioritize my time and to weigh the things that are the most important that I must accomplish each day. Now since we are in the third week of January, I have noticed that I am getting more done when I am concentrated on what needs to be done today instead of worrying about the long term goal or what needs to be done by Friday.
This morning, as I was doing my personal Bible reading, I came across this scripture in Proverbs: Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth (Proverbs 27:1) which then led me to one of Christ’s teachings on that same topic: Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof (Matthew 6:34). Instead of keeping my focus on today, oftentimes in my past I have focused on the future and willingly sacrificed too much of the present. Instead of enjoying the time with my children, with my family and friends, I chose to use all the time I had preparing for a future that may or may not have turned out to be the way I wanted it to.
This past Thursday, as I was returning home from an interview in Kansas City, Missouri, I needed to take a break from driving to stretch my legs and to refresh my mind. I decided to stop at a tourist-trap shop named Ozarkland near Kingdom City, Missouri. As I walked around the store full of the typical items normally found at such shops, I found a wooden sign that reads “Yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift, that is why we call it the present.” Normally, I do not buy house signs but this one was different. I honestly stood there for what seemed ten minutes looking at the sign and letting its simple message sink in. Tomorrow is the past; I cannot change what happened in it. As a Christian, all I can do is to seek forgiveness for those whom I have wronged, to forgive those who may have wronged me, and to seek forgiveness from God when I have fallen beyond temptation and have chosen to sink into sin. That’s all that I can do about yesterday and no amount of worrying or post-day analysis can change what has happened.
By fully accepting each day as a gift from God, we begin to see how important each day is and the people that fill our days. It is a gift from God that I get to spend time with my two-year old daughter. It is a gift from God when I get to attend church and enjoy the worship and fellowship with God and the other Christians that attend my church. It is a gift from God when I have the chance to share my love of history with my students in the classes I teach. When we begin to see the day and the things which are in it as time that is a gift from God we appreciate them more, waste less time, and are drawn to make every moment count. We begin to truly appreciate when our spouses, our children, coworkers, friends, and other family members want to share their time with us. It also makes us more careful in our interactions with others and with God; it creates a strong desire within us to avoid things that create discord between ourselves and those we care about.
It also causes us to prioritize what we decide to achieve each day; too many times in the past I had adopted the old attitude of if I cannot get it done today there is always tomorrow. Instead of doing what needed to be done, I picked and chose those things I wanted to do, piddled with things that didn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, or was just a poor steward of my time. Not only are we not promised tomorrow, but tomorrow has its own agenda and its own list of things that need to be done. Just as the sign said – tomorrow is a mystery indeed! We have no idea what tomorrow may hold and what could consume our time and keep us from getting everything we had planned to do.
I am not saying that we have to be productive every minute of the day; we do need our daily down time. What I have learned is that we need to make sure that when we do take that down time we have actually earned it. There’s nothing worse than running out of day before you run out of things to do – especially when unwise management of our time has left us with things that needed to be done and the things we did get done were the small items on the list that really didn’t matter. We allowed small things to take time away that we could be spending with our family, friends, and even our daily personal devotions with God. When we really value the gift of today and accept the reality that we are not promised anything but this moment, we really begin to see what is truly important in our lives and what is simply filler. In other words, we need to live each day as if it were our last.
As I was unpacking the car from the overnight trip to and from Kansas City, I shared the sign with my wife; she also agreed that we need to hang it where we can see it every day. We’ve decided that the perfect spot for it is in our dining area where it will be visible to all who are sitting at our dining room table. It’s a simple message that’s worth learning, memorizing, sharing, or maybe even just writing on a sticky-note and sticking it inside your Bible: Yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift, that is why we call it the present.
