And if I should live to beThe last leaf upon the treeIn the spring,Let them smile, as I do now,At the old forsaken boughWhere I cling.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

For all of us, the time is short and the span of life is brief On top of that, our real human problem, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said in a direct rebuke to the modern illusion, is not just that life is short but that we waste so much of it-so that life ceases for us "just when we are getting ready for it."35 But

Time and history have meaning. Under the twin truths of God's sovereignty and human significance, time and history are going somewhere, and each us is not only unique and significant in ourselves, but we have a unique and significant part to play in our own lives, in our own generation, and therefore in the overall sweep of history.

Modern life assaults us with an infinite range of things we could do, we would love to do, or some people tell us we should do. But we are not God and we are neither infinite nor eternal. We are quite simply finite. We have only so many years, so much energy, so many gray cells, and so many bank notes in our wallets. 'Life is too short to...' eventually shortens to 'life is too short.

The grace you had yesterday will not be sufficient for today.

Your story is a biography of wisdom and grace written by another.

The grief of midlife is not simply that we all collect things to regret, that we all fear getting old, or that we all mourn the demise of our dreams. We mourn the fact that midlife exposes our idols' fundamental inability to deliver.

Lord. I must recognize that God, in his awesome glory, is the only being in the universe who exists in timelessness. He has created me to live in and for a certain time and place. I must do all he has called me to do within the limits of the time he has given me.

The normal day is a 24-hour collection of little moments. Day after day, week after week, and year after year, these little moments set the character of a person's life.

It is sad how many people constantly live in the schizophrenic craziness of eternity amnesia. We were created to live in a forever relationship with a forever God forever. We were designed to live based on a long view of life. We were made to live with one eye on now and one eye on eternity. You and I simply cannot live as we were put together to live without forever.

If eternity is the plan, then it makes no sense to shrink your living down to the needs and wants of this little moment.