Making Memories in Time – Sunday, February 09, 1997
Among the resources we each possess; our time is the most precious and perishable. Each day ticking clocks and changing calendars, growing children and aging parents, remind us that life is fragile and fleeting. When we were children, it seemed like an endless processional of days would give us more than enough time to do everything; as adults, we realize that our limited time forces us to make important decisions and to create priorities. Still, too easily and too often we squander our time, forgetting that “time is the stuff of which life is made.”1
Time is truly a unique commodity; it can be exchanged for almost anything. However, since time cannot be stored or sold, reused or borrowed, it is the one particular in which all men are equal. Each morning all of us receive another 24 hours of life to invest, with the promise that we each will become a living record of what we chose to do with our time.
We cannot waste time with our bruising eternity. Instead of making memories, we are too frequently waiting to live – promising ourselves that after graduation, when the children are grown, or after we retire, we will then live life as we’ve dreamed it. How we will wish to relive our wasted hours if at life’s end we discover, in the poet’s words, “I have spent my life stringing and unstringing my instrument and all the while the song I had meant to sing has been left unsung.”2
While time’s unfaltering cadence marches past each of us, every day well lived rewards us with beautiful echoes of our time that we call memories. God has given each of us the gift of time, and, while we live, our lives are like unfinished symphonies. Each day offers us the chance to add a new measure, to revise part of the melody, or even to erase a few disharmonious notes. And, when we learn, as Kipling expressed it, to “fill each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run,” 3 time becomes our sharpened scythe for harvesting the fields of eternity.
Each morning God offers us another 24 hours; each evening we should consider how another day of our life was spent. When we use our time wisely, treasuring each day as if it were our last, we find that “yesterday is but a dream of happiness and every tomorrow is a vision of hope.”4
1 Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth, July 17, 1747
2 Rabindranath Tagore, quoted from May Peace Be With You (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994), p. 11.
3 Rudyard Kipling, “If,” One Hundred and One Famous Poems, ed. Roy J. Cook (Chicago; Contemporary Books, Inc., 1958) p. 113.
4 From Ancient Sanskrit, quoted from Robert Barlow Fox’s Color the Wind (Hanover; Christopher Publishing House, 1995), prologue.
February 09, 1997
Broadcast Number 3,521