Richard L. Evans
The Spoken Word
8 January 1961
AS TIME SWEEPS TOWARD ETERNITY
Westminster Chimes, which we have just heard, is somehow a symbol of the swiftly moving seasons, as time sweeps toward eternity.
In part we are what we are because of the total use we have made of time. As Alexis Carrel has so well said: “We keep within ourselves the organic, humoral, and psychological marks of all the events of our life. Like a nation, like an old country, like the cities, the factories, the farms, the cultivated fields, the Gothic cathedrals, the feudal castles, … we are the result of a history. Our personality is enriched by each new experience. … Each thought, each action … has definite consequences, inasmuch as we never separate ourselves from the past” — nor— he might have added— from the future. Time is so full, so fleeting, and upon its use depend all the possibilities there are.
As he contemplated time and his own retirement, Benjamin Franklin said: “I can hardly wish any Man better, than that he would seriously consider what he does with his Time: How and to What Ends he employs it; and what Returns he makes to God, his Neighbor and Himself for it …. To come but once into the World, and Trifle away our true Enjoyment of it, and of our selves in it, is lamentable indeed.”
“The truth is,” offered another observer, that “one’s vocation is never some far-off possibility.— It is always the simple round of duties which the passing hour brings.”
“Our grand business is,” as Carlyle commented, “not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” We should “Do today’s duty, fight today’s temptation; do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.”
All this from significant sources, leads us to ponder a kind of repentance— a repentance which would take us to the better use of time, with patience, with purposefulness, with improvement, not letting the swift moving seasons find us forever frustrated with unfulfilled intentions, but with an earnest turning toward the better use of another year of life that God has given.
Inspiring.
Solving today’s problems is probably all we can do, but so often it seems that all we ever accomplish with today’s solutions is the setting up of tomorrow’s problems. In retrospect it seems so obvious what was left undone or solved in a way that engenders an appearantly inescapable nightmare. Of course it is not obvious as it unfolds. We celebrate our victories and lick our wounds then go to sleep. Then we wake up to the crisis we had never foreseen.
I must disagree with Bro. Evan, and Carlyle. “do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things you cannot see.”
My experience is that looking forward to “things [I] cannot see” is a prime motivator to get things done today. I plant and weed a garden looking forward to the harvest. I love and discipline my young children looking forward to the day they’ll be responsible adults, and Christ himself, “For the joy set before him, endured the cross.”
I haven’t seen heaven or the afterlife, and “could not understand if [I] saw them,” but it’s still a prime motivator here and now.