The Rise and Fall of Life

“COULD be dead tomorrow,” I said to my gorgeous wife.

She laughed.

But it’s true.  Thirty Christmases ahead is no compensation for that thought.  What can be done today — this veritable hour — should be done, with gloriously settled haste.

Only God should sanction a man or a woman’s destiny, but men and women of influence too often sign-off the course of others’ history.  God Himself will allow what He alone may correct, in time.

All we can do is live the best decisions of our time, and live decisively for the hour we have.  It’s all we’ve got.  There is no promise of a Christmas thirty years off, or this Christmas for that matter.

Live now, but don’t do so wretchedly.  Do so wisely.  It’s all we can do.

The rise and fall of life is the chest filled and then expelled of air, to the last breath.

It’s only as I feel the weight of my three-year-old son sleep on my chest that I recall how wonderful it was when my twenty-three-year-old daughter did that when I was still in my twenties.  The good things of this life that we find drudgery; they’re fading.  Count them as gold, now.

These are the days of our history.  Soon we’ll be all gone.  It’s what makes Carpe Diem an imperative.

The rise and the fall of life are pivotal when we comprehend the eternity encapsulated in a solitary moment pregnant with possibility and fate.

We mess about with things beneath the glory represented in our mortal lives.  Why?  They seem important: position, power, possessions.  These are not important.

The rise and fall of life is important.  What will God say?  What decisions are we making?  How are we turning away from positions hemming us into envy, power of a worldly kind, and possessions that bond us away from love?

The rise and fall of life is in our position with God through Christ, in our power to love, and in our possession of His Word.

Live wisely.  Live well.  Live winsomely… Live.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.