Tonight I sit and listen to the moaning of the wind in the shrubs outside my window. There’s a misty sort of coldness in the breeze, and a melancholy fog has settled into the low places in the road. The last of the autumn leaves are rustling amidst the skeleton branches of the trees out in the yard, and the clouds have obscured the light of the moon and the stars.

Yesterday the moon was beautiful and the stars were bright. Yesterday there was no rain, no fog, no moaning wind to interrupt the stillness of a crisp night…but yesterday is gone.

All of the yesterdays are gone.

It’s incredible to me—sometimes frightening—how quickly things can change. Babies are born, children grow up, young folks marry, create new homes, new families, new lives…and then one day, they die…and the cycle of life continues.

But somewhere along the line, I hope that there comes a moment in time when each man or woman wonders keenly—maybe desperately—what it is that he’s really living for. I hope that in that moment, every woman thinks about what exactly she’s pouring into each 24-hour period of her existence…and I hope that every man realizes that every day, he’s trading 24 hours of his life for something…and I hope that this realization startles them, challenges them, changes them…frightens them.

Today I wondered about what it is that I’m trading my life for. What’s the legacy? Is it God’s vision...or I am trying to force His hand? Am I living life fully, and am I living it well?

Perhaps the key in answering that question is to zoom out, to remind ourselves what the big purpose is, so we can better understand the little part that we play.

Isaiah 45:5-7 clarified some things for me tonight:
“I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides Me, there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know Me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides Me; I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, Who does all these things.”

It’s comforting to be reminded of the fact that He equips us, that He doesn’t ask us to do anything that He hasn’t done Himself, that He understands every nuance of everything that we feel, that He has personally wrestled through the same struggles we fight on a daily basis…in short, that He has designed us, commissioned us, and cares more deeply about us than we will ever fully understand. He’s not just the coach who tells us how to run—He’s also the dad who meets us at the finish line with outstretched arms.

And to live in light of that knowledge ought to change the way in which I view the cycle of life. May we learn to make each day count as an accomplishment from an eternal perspective…