How Many Days Have I Lived?

There's a neat calculator on my Google home page that tells me that I've been alive for 20,703 days. That's 20,703 sunrises and 20,702 sunsets as it's still mid-afternoon when I write this on May 27th, 2008. I suspect that there are about twice that number of bowel movements. Sorry if that's TMI. I'm just one of those guys who likes statistics.

The same calculator tells me that, based on a biblical standard of 3 and a half-score years, I've only got about 4,865 days to go; barring anything stupid that I might do to shorten those days. Less than 5,000 days...less than a quarter of my life remaining.

Today I received in the mail a book titled "One Month To Live: 30 Days to a No-Regrets Life" by Terry and Chris Shook. It's one of about ten books I'm reading simultaneously. It seems the older I get, the more urgent life becomes. I can't remember much of what I've done or didn't do in almost 21,000 days of existence; but there's a need to accomplish something in the time I've got left. Maybe that feeling we get as we age is just God's way of letting us know we've not yet fulfilled our purpose. I certainly hope that I will finish this life accomplishing more than 'living from one tragedy to another', as Jerry Falwell once observed as the meaning of life. And I suspect that God has a different view than Jerry did. As much as I embarrass and frustrate Him, I know that He finds joy in the way I've grown older. For 20,703 days He's supplied my every need, answered countless prayers, withheld His wrath countless times, and given me new dreams to replace those I let slip away.

I am presently on a high plateau in my life. I'm engaged, in love (the love came first), I have renewed hope for the future: it's just a more positive outlook than I had a year ago. Unfortunately, those 4,865 remaining days seems awful short now. How do I cram into those days everything I want to accomplish and still be the husband, the father, the employee, the friend, and the author that I want to be?

In The Shack, written by William P Young, Jesus tells the character that man lives mostly in the past; and when we do think about the future, there's usually fear involved because of our experiences in our past. But God is not a past tense or future tense God; He is a God of Now, a living, relevant, life altering God who wants to spend time with us in the Present. Jesus told the man in The Shack that His desire was not for the man to be like Jesus, but for Him to live through the man.

Before I die, in the 4,865 days more or less that I have remaining, I want to walk on water with Jesus. I want to talk to Him from a mountain top. I want the Holy Spirit to lift me up and let me fly wherever the wind takes me. In my dreams I often am able to fly; that would be cool to get to the place where I'm living in the present and that God is living through me. Perhaps eternity is really living in the Present with, not the presence of, Christ.