On reflecting

I think most people...maybe me...lead unexamined lives. We rush through the day, doing the stuff of life, but are we really learning anything? At the end of a day, how much have I really grown? How much have the events of this day shaped me into the person I want to become? Or how much of it is just me trying to do the stuff of life? I guess there really isn't anything wrong with the stuff of life, is there? Some of it is good. Maybe even most of it. But I guess it is good only if it has a purpose. To make me into the person I was designed to be. To help shape the world into the place it was meant to be.

L. Smeeds write,: “I bought a brand new date book yesterday, the kind I buy every year: Spiral bound, black imitation leather covers, wrapped around pages and pages of blank squares. Every square has a number to tell me which day of the month I am in at the moment. Every square is a frame for one episode of my life. Before I’m through with the book I will fill the squares with classes I teach, people with whom I eat lunch, ever-lasting committee meetings I sit through.

And these are only the things I cannot afford to forget. I fill the squares too with things I do not write down for me to remember. Thousands of cups of coffee, some lovemaking, some praying, and I hope gestures of help to my neighbors. Whatever I do it has to fit inside one of those squares in my date book.

I live one square at the time. The four lines that make up the square are the walls of time that organize my life. Everything that I do has to fit into one square. Each square has an invisible door that leads to the next square. As if by a silent stoke the door opens and I’m pulled through it as if by a magnate, sucked into the next square in line. There, I will again fill the time frame that seals me, fill it with my busyness, just as I did the square before.

As I get older, the squares seem to get smaller. One day, I will walk into a square that has no door. There will be no mysterious opening, and no walking into an adjoining square. One of the squares will be terminal. I do not know which square it will be.“

It's really funny, but what I fill each square with is up to me. Not my boss, not my spouse, not the people I serve, not the culture. Me. And yet often I live my life as a victim of others setting my agenda. Or the agenda I feel God has for my life.

Am I filling my squares wisely? God give me this square called "today" and then the one thing I choose is, “How will I fill it?”

“Be very careful how you live you life, not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil.”