January 17 2012

Vapor
 
Reading: James 4:13-15, 13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; 14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.”

Okay, men, is it just me or did something magical happen when we hit 30 years old to cause the hour glass of time to go from a little trickle to an all out gush. When you’re a kid, time cannot move fast enough and now that I have kids, I’m constantly looking for the “pause” button. How did this happen? But, our lives are truly like a vapor. It is a blink and it’s gone. If you won a prize and the prize was the ability to fill a shopping cart at your favorite store (yes, you can use Cabella’s for the illustration) with as much as you can get within a 15 minutes period, what would you do? Would you treat this particular trip to the store like you might when you go with your wife to one of her favorite stores, shuffling your feet, rolling your eyes, creeping around the store at a snail’s pace wondering when the pain will end? I highly doubt it. I am sure that we would get as much value as we possibly could in the short time that we had. Men, this life is no different. The shopping spree prize would be pointless if you couldn’t take any of the things with you outside of the store. We have a brief time on this earth, why do we spend so much time on things that just plainly do not have value and we will not be able to take with us anyways?

How can you focus on things that have eternal value and spend your time doing those today? What are some of those things?




The challenge today is… it’s only today… but, keep track of everything that you spend time doing today; write down what you did as you are doing it and how much time you spent.



End of the Day Review
  
After reviewing the list of things that you spent time doing and how much time you spend doing them, how much time was spent of things that have eternal value?

How much time was spent on things that do not have eternal value?

What was the difference and what are your thoughts?