Despite the inestimable worth that our God places on fellowship within the trinity, we think nothing of breaking fellowship with the Lord to go and get something for ourselves that we feel we need… we think there is little consequence or meaning in our sinful pursuits, and so our momentary devaluation of God approaches infinity. The pain that Jesus endured to relinquish fellowship with the Father for a moment, we eagerly trade into for ill-gotten and utterly rotten “gain.” Teach us, Lord, to more rightly measure your worth, and to see more accurately the true value of fellowship with you!!!
Miscalculations
We bargain our lives, oblivious to the fullness of the stakes, with a chip both infinitely grand and impossibly tiny—the mere, measureless moment. Born and passing away by the trillions every second, the moment is the smallest copper in the currency of time, but, unlike a penny in a piggy, it can’t be saved. In rapid fire execution, we have to spend each moment as we receive it, before we even know what value it holds. At times, we understand some of the significance of the passing moment, as we blow candles to count a birthday, say “I do” at the altar, or shed tears at a deathbed, but the majority of life is made up of commonplace forgettable moments of transition between the “important” moments. These forgotten moments have their own importance, as they set up the big moments, but there are simply too many of them for us to live intentionally within.
Even if we could fully engage in all our moments, we are limited in our understanding, ability, and strength to make the most of them. Moments fly past at the speed of… time, and we are no more able to grasp the full significance of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, or any moment in between, than catch a tornado by its tail. We fail, as a people, to grasp the value of a moment. This failure to note the significance, importance, and value of the moments we are given, often accompanies a spiritual nonchalance, and a desire to live for earthly pleasures.
Some of the value of a moment can be understood with the example of the “do-over.” A “do-over” is what we, as kids, used to ask for, if there was some kind of mistake or foul-up while we were playing a game. I called for a do-over if I suspected that someone cheated somehow, or if I got distracted or impeded by uncontrollable circumstances, such as when a passing car impacts the play of kickball in the street.
There is a certain do-over mentality that we learn as children, and carry over into adulthood. Everyone has heard, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” This is an encouragement for learning and applying new knowledge and skills, and for the development of perseverance. Unfortunately, we extend the principle to cover sacred things, like marriage. “If at first you don’t succeed…” We also give ourselves over to sin quite easily, since we are sure that we’re covered by grace, and we can overcome the sin on another day. “My sin just looks too good today! Some day I’ll be ‘tight’ with God… He knows my heart loves Him… it’s just that right now, my sin is just too hard to stop.”
As a result, we are tempted to spend another day in captivity, enslaved by our own desires, and looking after our own interests. Unless something changes in our hearts, tomorrow will be the same story. We reason ourselves back into our cages, because we think we have unlimited “do-overs.”
God is the God of second chances, we understand. Do we fly more quickly into sin, because God is so forgiving? Does His grace become one of our biggest excuses to just do what seems right in our own eyes? If so, we are slowly piddling away “life more abundantly,” in order to live life more “tenaciously” (selfishly)–to grab, get, and hold on to everything we can through mortal means. Life more tenaciously seeks a false abundance, consisting of status, material success, and the glory of appearance, and promotes our own ingenuity and strength to attain and hold on to what we desire.
Life more tenaciously ignores the “Value Added” to our moments that is God. (I’ll come back to this in a moment).
We let most of our moments slip by without paying much attention to them on a spiritual level. We live life on the surface, engaged in a thousand concerns, but we (intentionally, or “accidentally”) leave God out of our concerns. What’s more, we tend not to ask God to show us what His concerns are for the moment, for the day, and for our lives. We become comfortable in the state of repeated “do-overs.” Assuming that we have unlimited second chances, we devalue the present moment and ignore the pricelessness of “now.” We look more to what we can get out of “now” for ourselves, and ignore what God is looking to do in the moment.
Our moments are of inestimable value, but we are asleep to this fact. Some of us get a “wake-up call” in the form of a close brush with death on the highway, or grave news from a doctor. Perhaps we are reminded by the death of someone close to us that we are not guaranteed another chance… another “do-over.”
If you were told, right now, that you only had one, maybe two weeks, to live, how would you live differently? My guess is that you would learn, in that relatively short time, the value of a moment. Every moment that passes by brings you closer to the death that you would love to put off. Every moment contains a richness that, more often than not, goes unnoticed when we think we have all the time in the world left to live.
I’m guessing that you would learn to treasure the people around you and to appreciate your few remaining interactions with them. Perhaps you would call that friend you haven’t spoken to in years, or write a letter to a dear relative to communicate how much you love them, or to ask for forgiveness. Maybe there is someone you would want to make peace with, knowing that your time is so short, and seeing that the issue that divides you is not all that important, after all.
Looking into the yawning jaws of death, and considering how you lived, maybe the regrets start setting in. “I should have lived differently… I wish I had never made this or that choice… I wish I had spent less time at the office, and more time with my wife and kids. I wish I had enjoyed the moments I had, dwelling within them, instead of being distant and detached by always looking to the future. I wish I had made more of an effort to know God.”
You begin to understand that there really are no “do-overs.” You can’t go backward in time and choose differently to love that rebellious son at the moment he needed it. You can’t go and take back those hurtful words you uttered that pushed your spouse over a precipice, that hurled your daughter out of your home, that estranged your father, that severed your fellowship and made an enemy out of a friend.
You can’t go back to the same moment in time and do differently, and the cascade of consequences that poured from that wrong choice or lack of intention, (or attention), can’t be made to run uphill again and run afresh through a more pleasant valley. The streams of your life run onward and plunge toward a sea, and every moment is a continental divide, an encounter with a rock, a moment of swirl, an eddy, a lap onto the shore, a freefall, a tumble, and a splash…
Every moment is a statement of your existence and representation of your beliefs—and your thoughts, words, and actions are like a turning and a flowing—this time right, this time left, this time straight away. And a watercourse stretches behind you with evidence of your passing… a worn stone, an eroded bank, a drowned harvest, a sunken ship, a wedding ring tumbled and lost in the sediment.
If your streams flow in the Lord, He will cause the course of your life to be a blessing, and a plain is watered, a thousand saplings nurtured, an oasis created, a message in a bottle delivered, a treasure uncovered, and a canoe turned toward adventure and a true home.
If we could grasp this idea, that our notion about “living for God” is not about the future, but instead is “living in Christ” right NOW, and Now, and now, and now, then our lives would be filled with the significance we crave. No matter how small the moment is in our own eyes, it contains the opportunity for a special expenditure of the power of God as we align our hearts in concert with Him, or it can contain a hardening of the heart that exerts its own kind of power, which grabs, scratches, spits, and mars, as it leaks its way into the land.
Consider a song. What is a song, but an orchestrated collection of notes… individual moments filled with an assigned sound? A song that is good and lovely to hear has a cadence and a harmony that is recognizable and pleasant. Each individual note, played in isolation, and without the context of the song, is not nearly as inspirational. Weighing the worth of a single note is like our thinking that a moment doesn’t really carry much weight.
But when one note is played, and then another after it, and another, a song develops, and our appreciation of the song can build. Sometimes a song can move us to tears, or to laughter, or call up a memory—accomplishing heart-work—because the composer and the players worked together to fit sounds (moments) together that inspire, or encourage, or cause deep and good reflection, or stir the memory of the mind or heart.
But if you take a musical score and delete some of the notes, or if unpracticed musicians skip notes, or beats, or play discordant sounds, we are reminded how important a note is to the whole, and we hear that the song is not the same, or falls apart and loses its power, because the players lost sight of the moment, and the will to play a strong and right note, or willfully chose to play a note that sounds foul to the ear and heart.
There is a Composer, and He desires to feed us the notes to play in each moment. Sometimes the note feels like a strange one to play, but because I trust this Composer, I will play the note in His strength, though I am unable to hear or fully appreciate where the song is going. I have to put aside my notion of what note would be better to play at this instant, thinking that my song will be better than the one My Composer is teaching me to play.
I want more and more to be able to see what God is doing in the moment, to hear what note He desires my part to play, and then have the will and conviction to play the strong note at the right moment. This is like what Paul says, in Ephesians 5:19-20, “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Your life, full of individual moments, is a song—a “poema,” in the Greek, translated to “handiwork,” in Ephesians 2:10—a masterpiece. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” NIV. Invite God to play through you, and God will make the song beautiful to Him. The world may hate the sound of it, but playing it faithfully produces a joy that is independent from the approval of man, and fixed on the One through Whom all true joy comes. The music expresses God’s love for us, and our love for Him, and every note carries a beauty in the ears of God, because He Himself inspires it and gives it weight in a divine composition.