If you could buy back a day of your life, what would it be?  Why?

What portion of your human existence would you pay any price to relive?

The moment.  The conversation.  The chance to say goodbye.  The night to rock your tiny baby to sleep in your arms one last time.  The space to share aloud the indelible mark someone left on your life.  The day at the ball park with your five-year-old.   The opportunity to travel with your vacation days instead of cashing them out.  The time to sit at your mother’s side and hold her frail fingers in yours a few hours longer before she slipped away.    The dance with your spouse on your dining room floor next to the aftermath of a family dinner on any given Tuesday. 

Our relationship with time is a funny thing.  If you hadn’t realized it up until this point in your life, the trippy time warp that is living in the midst of a pandemic has maybe brought it to your attention.  How can a week feel like a day and a million years all at once? 

Depending on your life circumstances, you’re maybe panicked about the future of your income, placing a great deal of pressure on yourself to create and generate in the “space” of this season. It is also quite possible that you can recall a time in the no-so-bygone past that you longed for a sabbatical of sorts.  When you are experiencing the frenetic pressure and urgency to scramble, rush, and produce, bring back to mind the moments in your life where you desperately wished to the point of a deep ache that you would have slowed down, sat, inhaled the aroma, listened closer, taken mental pictures. You can likely identify segments of your life story that you would give all of the money in the world to get back.

Time can seem like a gift, a curse, or some twisted tangle of the two.  There can be competing and complex pushing, pulling, and pressing tensions that exist in our lives vying for our time.  These powerful forces come from within and outside of ourselves. In the midst of living in a pandemic, what are you learning about the alignment of your calendar to your professed priorities?  

Here’s the thing about your time:  you never get it back.  It is a nonrenewable resource.  It is tremendously powerful.  It is truly precious. 

You only get to spend every moment of your existence once.  Buy carefully.