Human life cycle. Person growing up from baby to old age. By Ingenious Buddy/stock.adobe.com
You may stand 7-foot-3-inches tall with a wingspan of eight feet, but if you develop a tiny blood clot known as deep vein thrombosis, your basketball season is likely over. This is what happened to San Antonio Spurs star center Victor Wembanyama, who has been diagnosed with just such a blood clot in his right shoulder.
Such conditions are almost always treated with blood-thinning medications. Wembanyama is beginning treatment immediately; the good news is that he is expected to make a full recovery.
In other athletic news, Dallas Cowboys right guard Zack Martin is planning to retire from the NFL. Like Wembanyama, Martin is a massive human being, standing 6-feet-4 inches and weighing 309 pounds. But a degenerative ankle condition forced him out of the lineup last year and apparently hastened the end of his career.
Across his career, Martin totaled more Pro Bowls (nine) than false starts (eight) and as many first-team All-Pro selections as holding calls (seven). His next stop is likely to be the Hall of Fame in Canton.
Dolly Parton on aging
Some years ago, our church’s youth camp adopted the theme, “The Dash.” This was in reference to the dash between the dates on your tombstone, making the point that we only have today and that tomorrow is promised to no one.
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir similarly noted, “From the hour you’re born you begin to die. But between birth and death there’s life.” The key is to embrace that life as we can, while we can.
Seventy-nine-year-old Dolly Parton recently commented on getting older:
They say wisdom comes with age, and you cannot stop the aging process, nor the numbers. The way I live, the way I work, the way I feel, I’m going to make every moment count. I may live to be one hundred or I may die tomorrow, but whenever that is, I will know I died trying, and I will know I’ve done everything I could to make the most of everything.
Her sentiment is more biblical than we might at first imagine.
“Give us this day our daily bread”
Christian philosophers like me tend to express frustration with the existentialism of Western culture. This worldview teaches us that life should be viewed through the prism of our personal existence. It has given rise to postmodern relativism (truth is what you believe it to be) and rampant materialism (get what you can while you can).
But when existentialism is recast in a biblical context, it liberates us from guilt over the past and fear of the future so we can focus on the grace of the present.
The Lord revealed himself to Moses as the “I AM” (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew could be translated as “The One who was, is, and ever shall be.” This most personal name of God points to his timelessness, to the fact that he created the space-time continuum and transcends it. As CS Lewis noted, if we think of time as a line on a page, God is the page.
Unlike God, however, you and I live in time moment by moment. “Yesterday” and “tomorrow” are fictions rather than facts. This day, and indeed this moment, is all the time that exists for us.
This is why Scripture so consistently calls us to follow Jesus today. Our Lord was clear, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23, my emphasis). We are taught to pray for our “daily” bread (Matthew 6:11). Paul is our model: “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).
The grace of Christ liberates us to focus on the present because we can trust the past to his forgiving mercy and the future to his providential purpose. He forgives every sin we confess (1 John 1:9) and forgets all he forgives (Isaiah 43:25). And he promises his followers a future that is filled with his best (Jeremiah 29:11; Romans 12:2).
Such present-tense purpose is available to each of us as we remember the simple fact:
All of God there is, is in this moment.
What our bell tower told the world
One of the members of the pastor search committee that brought our family to Dallas in 1998 was a cancer patient for several years before his homegoing. Despite his suffering, he never lost his joy. His explanation was simple: he began every day by saying to himself, “This is the day that the Lᴏʀᴅ has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24). I used this proclamation at his memorial service, inviting us to live with the same purpose and peace.
When we live with infectious joy, others are attracted to its source in Christ. When we live each day fully, remembering that we are “more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37), we invite others to experience such love personally.
We can choose the existentialistic self-reliance of those who use the moment to serve themselves. Or we can choose the existentialistic freedom of those who use the moment to love their Lord and their neighbor. But we cannot do both.
Jesus told his followers, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9:4 KJV). The clock on the bell tower of the last church I pastored is inscribed with Jesus’ words, warning all who drive by: “Night Cometh.”
Are you ready?
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