How To Really Not Waste Your One Life: You Get To Do this

When we all just past the half way mark through this year, when I just return from my year 2 residency and pass the halfway mark for my doctorate in ministry, I find myself thinking much of time, and how it wildly keeps passing, and what does it mean to live your one glorious life well?

And I unexpectedly end up returning again in my mind to that time when the Farmer and I ended up flying within 4 degrees of the Arctic Circle, to take up the invitation of one of my dearest classmate friends — from when we both were getting our Masters from Wheaton — to come visit her at her home in the Faroe Islands, and she surprises us with this hike up this farm mountainside where they filmed that infamous character James Bond apparently dying, in a movie ironically named, No Time to Die.

It’s a strange thing to find yourself sitting on a peak with wandering sheep on this tipsy top edge of the world & kinda half-smiling at the very real gravestone for the imagined Jame Bond, with that etched abbreviated exhortation of Jack London’s full quote:

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

Visiting Faroe Shepherd John who owns this farm on this edge of the world, where the James Bond movie was filmed: John @kallsgardur Shepherd John’s sheep farm where the James Bond movie was filmed: John @kallsgardur

I look over at my grinning Farmer, and all these glorious grooved lines of time lining his face, an underlining of a lifetime of our memories, and I try to memorize this moment here at the jagged raw cliff at the end of the world, and there’s this feeling it:

When you realize all you have is time, all you have is one decision: What ways can you make your time into Love?.

Do not waste your days wanting more days.

It’s like the wind at the top of the world hushes everything, to ask the only question that matters:

What’s the wisest way to live before you die?

The wisest way to live is to know you have no time to waste.

When you realize that time is all you have, you realize all that you don’t want to waste your time on.

Because:

You don’t have a house… all you have is time that you spend on where you live.

You don’t have a vocation… all you have is time that you choose to give away to a vision, a work, a dream.

You don’t really even have a family or children or your people, in the sense that you don’t have, possess, own them … all you really have is time, fleeting time, to say you love them.

That’s what keep thinking about, that when I make another meal, when I fold another load of laundry, “This is how I get to love them, this is how I GET to love them.”

All time is for, is just to get to love — because Love is for forever.

That is to say: When you make time into love, you conquer time, because Love is what goes on forever and without end.

When you realize all you have is time, all you have is one decision: What ways can you make your time into Love?

Running my hands along the engraved lines of the granite gravestone marking the end of Bond, that imagined spy, I can hear the windswept top of the world whispering its secrets to those of us with very real graves coming sooner than we could ever imagine:

Use your time only for what is useful, and it’ll be your very soul that’s left feeling used.

You don’t have to waste your life wanting more time — when you can simply enjoy what time you have even more.

Use your time for more than just what is useful, but for partnering with God to make all things beautiful, and you won’t have anything to fear at your funeral.

The greatest function of humanity is to not merely exist, to not merely exist for self, to not merely exist for enjoyment, the greatest function of humanity is to exalt the God who exists, who births stars and everything into existence, and make all of existence about the beauty of enjoying Him.

The way to live and not merely exist is to make every moment simply about deeply enjoying — deeply enjoying the relentless love and beauty of God.

Because He knows:

Enjoying is what enlarges. Enjoy the wind in the trees, enjoy the laughter of your people, enjoy and savor and notice and give thanks for the grace of this amazing moment right here and now.

You don’t have to waste your life wanting more time — when you can simply enjoy what time you have even more.

Farmer John sharing with us on his sheep farm where the James Bond movie was filmed: John @kallsgardur

Isn’t that what the catechism says:

“What is the chief end of man?“

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.“

Our first priority everyday is to first enjoy God Almighty and all His grace.

The first and greatest commandment is that we love God, delight in God, enjoy God.

As the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards writes, since God’s “happiness consists in enjoying and rejoicing in Himself . . . so does also the creature’s happiness . . . [consist] in rejoicing in God; by which also God is magnified and exalted.”

So now is the time to savor and enjoy God and the grace of now , right now — because enjoying is what enlarges a life, and enjoying is what glorifies God:

Enjoy drippy ice cream and hollyhocks swaying in front of crooked picket fences and laugh too loud with someone today and feel how joy expands your lungs with life while there is still the gift of time here

Enjoy the glory of sky over you, and earth under you, and the wonder of Almighty God with the finiteness of you — and feel how He must love you to make His home in you and with you and through you.

Enjoy this moment and the way the light’s warm at your feet right this instant and you will, if you’re unexpectedly blessed, get to hear you love’s footsteps come back to you again today, and you will find their eyes and you will smile, and your heart will explode a bit, that you get all this miracle at least one more time.

Enjoy all this amazing grace, and make every second of all your time into Love that lasts forever. Everything can be a way to get to Love.

Every moment that we love has eternity in it.

At the top of this big ole windy world, James Bond’s very real gravestone may have written it in granite, that we aren’t here to merely exist, but to live, that right now we have the time to live, fully live.

And you can feel it, there within, written across your ole thrumming ticker, written there by the finger of God, eternity written right into your fiercely beating heart.

Every moment that we love has eternity in it.

Looking for the way through to a deeply meaningful life — that doesn’t waste your only life?

“If there’s a deep disconnect in what we believe and how we actually live —
is it maybe because we’ve forgotten the way to live actually and intimately connected to God? 

Our walk will only match our talk when we live attached to His heart.

This is how we live, fully live, live the love story of our dreams.

This is the way of all the epic Love stories.”  ~ from WayMaker

Come wake to enjoying your one and only life, enjoying God, enjoying the time you have here, your very own WayMaker who will carry you the best way through .