Time

Here I am again.  I actually managed to find my way back to my own blog site.  Three cheers for me!
Laugh all you want.  This is quite an achievement for me considering my lack of tech savviness.
     So, about the verse (Ecclesiastes 9:4 "...even a live dog is better off than a dead lion.") and why I chose it.    If you have never read the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, I suggest you read it.  Don't say you read or heard Chapter 3, (you know, the chapter on A Time For Everything).  That doesn't count.  One has to read the WHOLE book to really appreciate what Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived (aside from Jesus Christ) had to say.   Now, I'm not going to go into a sermon about this book, because I know there are plenty of preachers/teachers out there that have posted their take on it already.  Suffice it to say, I love the book because it reminds me that this life is very short and that, without God in my life, it really has no meaning.
     Yesterday I went to a funeral for a dear friend of mine whose wife had passed.  She was 57 years old, very close to my age.  The funeral was a seven hour drive from where I live.  This dear friend of mine is like a brother to me and we were close back about 20 years ago.  But then, I got married, moved away, had kids.  He got married, had kids...  We grew apart both physically and friendship-wise, it seemed.    I worried and fretted about going to pay my respects after losing touch for so many years.  Will he be angry and ask, "What are you doing here?" or, will he say, "I haven't heard from you hardly at all and now you show up?"   
     Turns out, he was amazed that my husband and I drove all that way to come see him. Amazed and appreciative.    He said later after the grave side service that we just pick up where we left off, as if no time had passed by.  "Time melts away the years," he said.
    My point is, I let time slip by without paying attention.  Twenty years went by in a blink of an eye.  And the same was true for my friend.  He didn't pay attention to the time either, so it seems, the way he acted when he saw me.  It was if no time had gone by.
      As I grow older, time is something I think about more often.  You've heard the expression, Redeem the time?  That's a recurring theme that gets in my face more and more frequently.  I see the clock of my own life ticking away, and often get that needling in the back of my mind, "what are you doing with your time?"   Thinking about the brief conversation I had with my friend at his wife's funeral, about time melting away the years, I get a small glimpse of God's perspective about time, how He can see the beginning and the end all at once.  They say time doesn't exist in Heaven.  If that's the case, all of history since Adam and Eve must seem very brief to God.  No big deal.  My own life...just a fraction of a second to Him.  And all the lives of everyone that follow me, they will be just a vapor in God's eyes.  "Everything to come is meaningless," Solomon said in chapter 11:8   And yet, he exhorts in Chapter 12 "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, 'I find no pleasure in them'."  It's something I took to heart a long time ago (maybe more than 20 years ago), and it has paid off.  Trouble and hardship came into my life that would weaken me to my knees, forcing me to remember my Creator to help me through them all.  Without my Creator, I'm nothing but a 'live dog' doing better than a 'dead lion'.  Maybe someone reading this post feels this way, and nothing more.  Ecclesiastes 5:18-20 exhorts, "Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him--for this is his lot.  Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work--this is a gift of God.  He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart."
     So Live Dog sort of describes me.  Yeah, I'm better off than a dead lion...And yet, I'm much more than that, thanks to God.