Robert Zimmerman
Living The 24 Hour Gift
James 4:13-14 “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a such city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.”
I believe life has been teaching me the importance of being more fully present to the day that I am in. Sometimes an hour is too short, and a week a month or a year is too long. But days are the bite-sized portions to life, the God designed units of time. How Many Times Does Your Heart Beat in a Day? According to the Mayo Clinic, the average adult heart beats 60 to 100 times per minute, which translates to 86,400 to 144,000 beats per day. A day equals 1,440 minutes—A day, a complete rotation of the earth—A day with both the sunrise and a sunset.
I am talking about seeking to taste the here and now—the day that you are actually in. Impatience will make us want to get away from where we are in the now of today. We are tempted to behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, somewhere else. Let’s be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand today—be living fully in the day we have been given.
How about the decision to live a brand new, untouched, unchartered, unused day! The gift of twenty-four unlived, unexplored hours. And if you can stack one good day on another and another, you will link together a good life. But here is what we must keep in mind—you no longer have yesterday. It slipped away as you slept. It is gone—you can’t alter it or improve it. There are no mulligans. Have you noticed the hourglass sand won’t flow upward. The second hand of the clock refuses to tick backward. The monthly calendar reads left to right, not right to left. We no longer have yesterday.
You don’t yet have tomorrow—you can’t live tomorrow today. You can’t spend tomorrow’s money, celebrate tomorrow’s achievements or resolve tomorrow’s riddles. You only fully have today. This is the day that the Lord has made. Live in it. You must be present to win.
Dear Father, thanks for giving us life in daily portions. You know that 24 hours are sufficient for us to manage—yet it is so easy to fret about what happened yesterday—and worry about what we fear tomorrow. Teach us to live more fully in the present. Give us wisdom and strength to take life one day at a time.