Life is Short. If you live to be 100, life is still short. In the light of eternity this life is so short.
In this picture I am probably about 13 years old. Winning a baseball game was probably the most important thing on my mind at the time. Me and my friends wondered why we could not play more games in a season. Why couldn't we play four or five times each week? What is the big deal? Let's play ball. Let's play two games every night.
The coach's, parents, umpires and everybody else involved had life to deal with and we just had baseball. We had not yet learned that there were more important things than baseball. It seemed like an eternity passed if we had to wait a week between games.
At that age I also spent an awful lot of time on the bank of the Little Miami River and along the spillway of Caesar Creek Lake. I had to do something to fill the eternity between games. Two of the guys in that picture were with me a whole bunch of that time. I guess fishing was pretty important to us too.
33 years have passed since that summer and time has flown by. There are days that the time elapsed seems more like 33 minutes instead of 33 years. A week is no longer an eternity. A week is a blink of an eye. A year does not drag on forever, it races by with a roar and a flash. Where did the time go?
As time moved along, the priorities of life changed too.
I can not remember the last time I played baseball or cared one little ounce about baseball. Spending the night sleeping on the ground as close to the fire as I dare, does not sound fun at all. Life has moved on and I have moved with it. And it moved so fast.
Last Saturday all the kids in the picture above were still riding the speeding train of life, as far as I know. Yesterday one of them was laid in the ground. I attended his viewing Thursday evening. His brother told me that he was talking one minute and that he was dead the next. He literally fell over dead.
Life is short and it does not take long to die. 13 years old and nothing to worry about but baseball and fishing. The next thing you know you are 46 years old and you are hanging on for dear life. Life is so full of things and stuff, joys and problems, family and friends, jobs and obligations, bills and payments and laughter and tears. You do not have time for anything else. How can we fit one more little thing in to our busy lives?
Who has time to think about next month, much less what follows that? Who has time to die? Nobody. Nobody has time to die. But since life is so short and so crowded we MUST take time to prepare to die.
That is one sure thing that is coming. It is appointed unto man once to die and after that, the judgement. Oh what a thought. Every man must die and then every man must face God. Every man must be prepared to die.
We can not save ourselves. We can not prepare ourselves. There is no one that is good enough for God. But God loves us so much that He sent His only begotten son to die in our place, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life!
Believe on Jesus Christ.
Confess your sins.
Allow Him to radically and completely change your life.
Devote yourself to Him and to righteous living.
When this short life is over, you will be so glad you lived it for Christ.
Life is so short and eternity is long. I can live this short life for me and spend eternity separated from God. Or I can live this short life for Christ and spend eternity with God.
I have made my decision and everyday I am renewing myself to that commitment.
Have your made a decision about what to do with your short life?
Davy
