Perhaps the misfortune that you do not like, leads you to a beautiful destiny that you never dreamed of. Anonymous
Life is a pilgrimage, or so it is said. We travel a road full of twists and turns, beginning in a womb and ending in a tomb. We find ourselves eventually holding court beneath a stone with name and dates engraved, but it is really the tomb of an unknown. Immediate family may pop by for a visit, but it won’t last long, and when that generation passes on, the stone with its engravings will sit and, over time, begin to wear away with exposure to the constant bombardment of sun and rain, snow and ice, and the vegetative mastication of not-so-innocent mosses and lichens that latch onto the engravings, seeking to devour the very stone itself – over time.
“Time marches on; it waits for no man,” said my grandmother. She knew a thing or two about time. Although she was in her nineties when she died, I am sure I thought she was in her nineties back when I was just a child, and she was likely in her forties or fifties, instead. The concept of time is wasted on youth. What the heck do we know?
Time. Nothing lasts forever. Heck, some things come broken straight out of the box. I bought a new laptop that I spent months troubleshooting online, as well as shipping it back and forth with their technical support staff. It is still a five pound paperweight. The manufacturer insists it works fine. Their computers tell them it meets all their specifications and returns no errors. My experience tells me something different. Life’s too short to keep up the fight, so I’ll just have the bleeding thing cremated with me when the time comes to topple from the frying pan into the fire.
Time. It seems there is a magazine with that moniker, although odds are pretty good my mug will never grace the cover of that periodical. That’s OK. I’m not out for fame or fortune, although a little more fortune would be nice. Fame, on the other hand, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I’m not famous and (by Somebody’s good grace) I’m not infamous. It has been ages since I have even looked at a magazine rack in a store, so I don’t know what periodicals are left standing. Perhaps their time has passed, too.
Time. It comes and goes. I have a desk clock I inherited from my great uncle, Gus. It hasn’t worked in years. Clock experts have looked at it, but none have been able to restore it to a functioning condition, but that’s OK. It has the correct time twice a day and dresses up the curio cabinet in the living room very nicely. I may try to find a specialist to look at it, but only time will tell if I will ever get around to it.
Time. I am obsessed with the topic, it’s true, and I think my interest was inherited. The first thing I ever coveted from a very early age was a wristwatch. My mother told me I could have one when I learned to tell time. I studied the hands on the kitchen clock daily until I knew far more than the basics. Hour hands and minute hands were easy. I made sure I knew the “quarters past and the quarters to” and the “half pasts and the thirty minutes tils.”
I saved money from odd jobs, allowances, and birthdays until one day I was finally ready to buy a decent wristwatch. I went to the jewelry counter at Ballard’s JC Penny store and picked out a wonderful looking timepiece for which I had exact change. Sadly, I didn’t have enough extra to cover the sales AND luxury taxes imposed at the time, so I left empty handed.
That’s OK, though. Empty handed is exactly how we enter this life, and that’s how we’re going to leave it. It’s what we do between those two points that gives time its value, and that’s all the time or space I have for now in this, our valley.
Keith Axberg writes on matters concerning life and faith. Author of newly released: Who the Blazes is Jesus? Good News for a Vulgar World (available through Amazon in Print and e-book)
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